DCDB Wintermute: Enabling Online and Holistic Operational Data Analytics on HPC Systems

As we approach the exascale era, the size and complexity of HPC systems continues to increase, raising concerns about their manageability and sustainability. For this reason, more and more HPC centers are experimenting with fine-grained monitoring coupled with Operational Data Analytics (ODA) to optimize efficiency and effectiveness of system operations. However, while monitoring is a common reality in HPC, there is no well-stated and comprehensive list of requirements, nor matching frameworks, to support holistic and online ODA. This leads to insular ad-hoc solutions, each addressing only specific aspects of the problem. In this paper we propose Wintermute, a novel generic framework to enable online ODA on large-scale HPC installations. Its design is based on the results of a literature survey of common operational requirements. We implement Wintermute on top of the holistic DCDB monitoring system, offering a large variety of configuration options to accommodate the varying requirements of ODA applications. Moreover, Wintermute is based on a set of logical abstractions to ease the configuration of models at a large scale and maximize code re-use. We highlight Wintermute's flexibility through a series of practical case studies, each targeting a different aspect of the management of HPC systems, and then demonstrate the small resource footprint of our implementation.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 29th ACM International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC 2020

Computing systems in a pseudomarine operational environment: design and initial test results

Contemporary research recognizes the need to reduce the cooling costs of data centre systems. This is beneficial and also reduces the operational costs. The operational costs can be reduced by using water for cooling instead of relying on conventional cooling systems comprising airconditioners, chillers and cooling towers. The cooling effect of water can be leveraged by siting the underwater data centre in a marine or pseudomarine environment. A pseudomarine environment is considered here since it overcomes the operational challenges associated with obtaining the regulatory permits required to access the marine environment. In addition, the discussion in the paper presents the design of a desktop computing system that uses water for cooling in a pseudomarine environment. The performance test of the desktop computing system is conducted in Oyo, Oyo State Nigeria. This is done to examine the viability of designing and using minidata centres sited in a pseudomarine environment in Nigeria. The initial results indicate that a personal desktop computer in the role of the mini data centre is able to support the execution of software installation without the use of conventional cooling i.e fans for a period exceeding 25 minutes. In this case, the cooling is realized using the emulated pseudo marine environment