Metascheduling of HPC Jobs in Day-Ahead Electricity Markets

High performance grid computing is a key enabler of large scale collaborative computational science. With the promise of exascale computing, high performance grid systems are expected to incur electricity bills that grow super-linearly over time. In order to achieve cost effectiveness in these systems, it is essential for the scheduling algorithms to exploit electricity price variations, both in space and time, that are prevalent in the dynamic electricity price markets. In this paper, we present a metascheduling algorithm to optimize the placement of jobs in a compute grid which consumes electricity from the day-ahead wholesale market. We formulate the scheduling problem as a Minimum Cost Maximum Flow problem and leverage queue waiting time and electricity price predictions to accurately estimate the cost of job execution at a system. Using trace based simulation with real and synthetic workload traces, and real electricity price data sets, we demonstrate our approach on two currently operational grids, XSEDE and NorduGrid. Our experimental setup collectively constitute more than 433K processors spread across 58 compute systems in 17 geographically distributed locations. Experiments show that our approach simultaneously optimizes the total electricity cost and the average response time of the grid, without being unfair to users of the local batch systems.Comment: Appears in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed System

Borg : the next generation

This paper analyzes a newly-published trace that covers 8 different Borg [35] clusters for the month of May 2019. The trace enables researchers to explore how scheduling works in large-scale production compute clusters. We highlight how Borg has evolved and perform a longitudinal comparison of the newly-published 2019 trace against the 2011 trace, which has been highly cited within the research community. Our findings show that Borg features such as alloc sets are used for resource-heavy workloads; automatic vertical scaling is effective; job-dependencies account for much of the high failure rates reported by prior studies; the workload arrival rate has increased, as has the use of resource over-commitment; the workload mix has changed, jobs have migrated from the free tier into the best-effort batch tier; the workload exhibits an extremely heavy-tailed distribution where the top 1% of jobs consume over 99% of resources; and there is a great deal of variation between different clusters.Publisher PD

Reference Exascale Architecture (Extended Version)

While political commitments for building exascale systems have been made, turning these systems into platforms for a wide range of exascale applications faces several technical, organisational and skills-related challenges. The key technical challenges are related to the availability of data. While the first exascale machines are likely to be built within a single site, the input data is in many cases impossible to store within a single site. Alongside handling of extreme-large amount of data, the exascale system has to process data from different sources, support accelerated computing, handle high volume of requests per day, minimize the size of data flows, and be extensible in terms of continuously increasing data as well as an increase in parallel requests being sent. These technical challenges are addressed by the general reference exascale architecture. It is divided into three main blocks: virtualization layer, distributed virtual file system, and manager of computing resources. Its main property is modularity which is achieved by containerization at two levels: 1) application containers - containerization of scientific workflows, 2) micro-infrastructure - containerization of extreme-large data service-oriented infrastructure. The paper also presents an instantiation of the reference architecture - the architecture of the PROCESS project (PROviding Computing solutions for ExaScale ChallengeS) and discusses its relation to the reference exascale architecture. The PROCESS architecture has been used as an exascale platform within various exascale pilot applications. This paper also presents performance modelling of exascale platform with its validation

Big Data-Oriented PaaS Architecture with Disk-as-a-Resource Capability and Container-Based Virtualization

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of Grid Computing. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-018-9460-4[Abstract] With the increasing adoption of Big Data technologies as basic tools for the ongoing Digital Transformation, there is a high demand for data-intensive applications. In order to efficiently execute such applications, it is vital that cloud providers change the way hardware infrastructure resources are managed to improve their performance. However, the increasing use of virtualization technologies to achieve an efficient usage of infrastructure resources continuously widens the gap between applications and the underlying hardware, thus decreasing resource efficiency for the end user. Moreover, this scenario is especially troublesome for Big Data applications, as storage resources are one of the most heavily virtualized, thus imposing a significant overhead for large-scale data processing. This paper proposes a novel PaaS architecture specifically oriented for Big Data where the scheduler offers disks as resources alongside the more common CPU and memory resources, looking forward to provide a better storage solution for the user. Furthermore, virtualization overheads are reduced to the bare minimum by replacing heavy hypervisor-based technologies with operating-system-level virtualization based on light software containers. This architecture has been deployed on a Big Data infrastructure at the CESGA supercomputing center, used as a testbed to compare its performance with OpenStack, a popular private cloud platform. Results have shown significant performance improvements, reducing the execution time of representative Big Data workloads by up to 4.5×.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad; TIN2016-75845-P, AEI/FEDER, EUMinisterio de Educación; FPU15/0338

Constraint Programming-based Job Dispatching for Modern HPC Applications

A High-Performance Computing job dispatcher is a critical software that assigns the finite computing resources to submitted jobs. This resource assignment over time is known as the on-line job dispatching problem in HPC systems. The fact the problem is on-line means that solutions must be computed in real-time, and their required time cannot exceed some threshold to do not affect the normal system functioning. In addition, a job dispatcher must deal with a lot of uncertainty: submission times, the number of requested resources, and duration of jobs. Heuristic-based techniques have been broadly used in HPC systems, at the cost of achieving (sub-)optimal solutions in a short time. However, the scheduling and resource allocation components are separated, thus generates a decoupled decision that may cause a performance loss. Optimization-based techniques are less used for this problem, although they can significantly improve the performance of HPC systems at the expense of higher computation time. Nowadays, HPC systems are being used for modern applications, such as big data analytics and predictive model building, that employ, in general, many short jobs. However, this information is unknown at dispatching time, and job dispatchers need to process large numbers of them quickly while ensuring high Quality-of-Service (QoS) levels. Constraint Programming (CP) has been shown to be an effective approach to tackle job dispatching problems. However, state-of-the-art CP-based job dispatchers are unable to satisfy the challenges of on-line dispatching, such as generate dispatching decisions in a brief period and integrate current and past information of the housing system. Given the previous reasons, we propose CP-based dispatchers that are more suitable for HPC systems running modern applications, generating on-line dispatching decisions in a proper time and are able to make effective use of job duration predictions to improve QoS levels, especially for workloads dominated by short jobs

ДОСЯГНЕННЯ ЕФЕКТИВНОГО РОЗПОДІЛЕНОГО ПЛАНУВАННЯ ЗА ДОПОМОГОЮ ЧЕРГ ПОВІДОМЛЕНЬ У ХМАРІ ДЛЯ БАГАТОЗАДАЧНИХ ОБЧИСЛЕНЬ ТА ВИСОКОПРОДУКТИВНИХ ОБЧИСЛЕНЬ

Due to the growth of data and the number of computational tasks, it is necessary to ensure the required level of system performance. Performance can be achieved by scaling the system horizontally / vertically, but even increasing the amount of computing resources does not solve all the problems. For example, a complex computational problem should be decomposed into smaller subtasks, the computation time of which is much shorter. However, the number of such tasks may be constantly increasing, due to which the processing on the services is delayed or even certain messages will not be processed. In many cases, message processing should be coordinated, for example, message A should be processed only after messages B and C. Given the problems of processing a large number of subtasks, we aim in this work - to design a mechanism for effective distributed scheduling through message queues. As services we will choose cloud services Amazon Webservices such as Amazon EC2, SQS and DynamoDB. Our FlexQueue solution can compete with state-of-the-art systems such as Sparrow and MATRIX. Distributed systems are quite complex and require complex algorithms and control units, so the solution of this problem requires detailed research.Due to the growth of data and the number of computational tasks, it is necessary to ensure the required level of system performance. Performance can be achieved by scaling the system horizontally / vertically, but even increasing the amount of computing resources does not solve all the problems. For example, a complex computational problem should be decomposed into smaller subtasks, the computation time of which is much shorter. However, the number of such tasks may be constantly increasing, due to which the processing on the services is delayed or even certain messages will not be processed. In many cases, message processing should be coordinated, for example, message A should be processed only after messages B and C. Given the problems of processing a large number of subtasks, we aim in this work - to design a mechanism for effective distributed scheduling through message queues. As services we will choose cloud services Amazon Webservices such as Amazon EC2, SQS and DynamoDB. Our FlexQueue solution can compete with state-of-the-art systems such as Sparrow and MATRIX. Distributed systems are quite complex and require complex algorithms and control units, so the solution of this problem requires detailed research

Multi-attribute demand characterization and layered service pricing

As cloud computing gains popularity, understanding the pattern and structure of its workload is increasingly important in order to drive effective resource allocation and pricing decisions. In the cloud model, virtual machines (VMs), each consisting of a bundle of computing resources, are presented to users for purchase. Thus, the cloud context requires multi-attribute models of demand. While most of the available studies have focused on one specific attribute of a virtual request such as CPU or memory, to the best of our knowledge there is no work on the joint distribution of resource usage. In the first part of this dissertation, we develop a joint distribution model that captures the relationship among multiple resources by fitting the marginal distribution of each resource type as well as the non-linear structure of their correlation via a copula distribution. We validate our models using a public data set of Google data center usage. Constructing the demand model is essential for provisioning revenue-optimal configuration for VMs or quality of service (QoS) offered by a provider. In the second part of the dissertation, we turn to the service pricing problem in a multi-provider setting: given service configurations (qualities) offered by different providers, choose a proper price for each offered service to undercut competitors and attract customers. With the rise of layered service-oriented architectures there is a need for more advanced solutions that manage the interactions among service providers at multiple levels. Brokers, as the intermediaries between customers and lower-level providers, play a key role in improving the efficiency of service-oriented structures by matching the demands of customers to the services of providers. We analyze a layered market in which service brokers and service providers compete in a Bertrand game at different levels in an oligopoly market while they offer different QoS. We examine the interaction among players and the effect of price competition on their market shares. We also study the market with partial cooperation, where a subset of players optimizes their total revenue instead of maximizing their own profit independently. We analyze the impact of this cooperation on the market and customers' social welfare

The Inter-cloud meta-scheduling

Inter-cloud is a recently emerging approach that expands cloud elasticity. By facilitating an adaptable setting, it purposes at the realization of a scalable resource provisioning that enables a diversity of cloud user requirements to be handled efficiently. This study’s contribution is in the inter-cloud performance optimization of job executions using metascheduling concepts. This includes the development of the inter-cloud meta-scheduling (ICMS) framework, the ICMS optimal schemes and the SimIC toolkit. The ICMS model is an architectural strategy for managing and scheduling user services in virtualized dynamically inter-linked clouds. This is achieved by the development of a model that includes a set of algorithms, namely the Service-Request, Service-Distribution, Service-Availability and Service-Allocation algorithms. These along with resource management optimal schemes offer the novel functionalities of the ICMS where the message exchanging implements the job distributions method, the VM deployment offers the VM management features and the local resource management system details the management of the local cloud schedulers. The generated system offers great flexibility by facilitating a lightweight resource management methodology while at the same time handling the heterogeneity of different clouds through advanced service level agreement coordination. Experimental results are productive as the proposed ICMS model achieves enhancement of the performance of service distribution for a variety of criteria such as service execution times, makespan, turnaround times, utilization levels and energy consumption rates for various inter-cloud entities, e.g. users, hosts and VMs. For example, ICMS optimizes the performance of a non-meta-brokering inter-cloud by 3%, while ICMS with full optimal schemes achieves 9% optimization for the same configurations. The whole experimental platform is implemented into the inter-cloud Simulation toolkit (SimIC) developed by the author, which is a discrete event simulation framework