575 research outputs found
HPC Cloud for Scientific and Business Applications: Taxonomy, Vision, and Research Challenges
High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to
on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business
analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the
cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise
environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid
environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud
resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources
and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which
range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying
platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the
discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large
users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a
survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is
ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can
help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly
relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from
big data and artificial intelligence.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, Published in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR
Kernel-assisted and Topology-aware MPI Collective Communication among Multicore or Many-core Clusters
Multicore or many-core clusters have become the most prominent form of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Hardware complexity and hierarchies not only exist in the inter-node layer, i.e., hierarchical networks, but also exist in internals of multicore compute nodes, e.g., Non Uniform Memory Accesses (NUMA), network-style interconnect, and memory and shared cache hierarchies.
Message Passing Interface (MPI), the most widely adopted in the HPC communities, suffers from decreased performance and portability due to increased hardware complexity of multiple levels. We identified three critical issues specific to collective communication: The first problem arises from the gap between logical collective topologies and underlying hardware topologies; Second, current MPI communications lack efficient shared memory message delivering approaches; Last, on distributed memory machines, like multicore clusters, a single approach cannot encompass the extreme variations not only in the bandwidth and latency capabilities, but also in features such as the aptitude to operate multiple concurrent copies simultaneously.
To bridge the gap between logical collective topologies and hardware topologies, we developed a distance-aware framework to integrate the knowledge of hardware distance into collective algorithms in order to dynamically reshape the communication patterns to suit the hardware capabilities. Based on process distance information, we used graph partitioning techniques to organize the MPI processes in a multi-level hierarchy, mapping on the hardware characteristics. Meanwhile, we took advantage of the kernel-assisted one-sided single-copy approach (KNEM) as the default shared memory delivering method. Via kernel-assisted memory copy, the collective algorithms offload copy tasks onto non-leader/not-root processes to evenly distribute copy workloads among available cores. Finally, on distributed memory machines, we developed a technique to compose multi-layered collective algorithms together to express a multi-level algorithm with tight interoperability between the levels. This tight collaboration results in more overlaps between inter- and intra-node communication.
Experimental results have confirmed that, by leveraging several technologies together, such as kernel-assisted memory copy, the distance-aware framework, and collective algorithm composition, not only do MPI collectives reach the potential maximum performance on a wide variation of platforms, but they also deliver a level of performance immune to modifications of the underlying process-core binding
Checkpointing as a Service in Heterogeneous Cloud Environments
A non-invasive, cloud-agnostic approach is demonstrated for extending
existing cloud platforms to include checkpoint-restart capability. Most cloud
platforms currently rely on each application to provide its own fault
tolerance. A uniform mechanism within the cloud itself serves two purposes: (a)
direct support for long-running jobs, which would otherwise require a custom
fault-tolerant mechanism for each application; and (b) the administrative
capability to manage an over-subscribed cloud by temporarily swapping out jobs
when higher priority jobs arrive. An advantage of this uniform approach is that
it also supports parallel and distributed computations, over both TCP and
InfiniBand, thus allowing traditional HPC applications to take advantage of an
existing cloud infrastructure. Additionally, an integrated health-monitoring
mechanism detects when long-running jobs either fail or incur exceptionally low
performance, perhaps due to resource starvation, and proactively suspends the
job. The cloud-agnostic feature is demonstrated by applying the implementation
to two very different cloud platforms: Snooze and OpenStack. The use of a
cloud-agnostic architecture also enables, for the first time, migration of
applications from one cloud platform to another.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, appears in CCGrid, 201
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