High Performance Computing using Infiniband-based clusters

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Composable architecture for rack scale big data computing

The rapid growth of cloud computing, both in terms of the spectrum and volume of cloud workloads, necessitate re-visiting the traditional rack-mountable servers based datacenter design. Next generation datacenters need to offer enhanced support for: (i) fast changing system configuration requirements due to workload constraints, (ii) timely adoption of emerging hardware technologies, and (iii) maximal sharing of systems and subsystems in order to lower costs. Disaggregated datacenters, constructed as a collection of individual resources such as CPU, memory, disks etc., and composed into workload execution units on demand, are an interesting new trend that can address the above challenges. In this paper, we demonstrated the feasibility of composable systems through building a rack scale composable system prototype using PCIe switch. Through empirical approaches, we develop assessment of the opportunities and challenges for leveraging the composable architecture for rack scale cloud datacenters with a focus on big data and NoSQL workloads. In particular, we compare and contrast the programming models that can be used to access the composable resources, and developed the implications for the network and resource provisioning and management for rack scale architecture

Analysis and evaluation of MapReduce solutions on an HPC cluster

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Computers & Electrical Engineering. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2015.11.021[Abstract] The ever growing needs of Big Data applications are demanding challenging capabilities which cannot be handled easily by traditional systems, and thus more and more organizations are adopting High Performance Computing (HPC) to improve scalability and efficiency. Moreover, Big Data frameworks like Hadoop need to be adapted to leverage the available resources in HPC environments. This situation has caused the emergence of several HPC-oriented MapReduce frameworks, which benefit from different technologies traditionally oriented to supercomputing, such as high-performance interconnects or the message-passing interface. This work aims to establish a taxonomy of these frameworks together with a thorough evaluation, which has been carried out in terms of performance and energy efficiency metrics. Furthermore, the adaptability to emerging disks technologies, such as solid state drives, has been assessed. The results have shown that new frameworks like DataMPI can outperform Hadoop, although using IP over InfiniBand also provides significant benefits without code modifications.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; TIN2013-42148-

EbbRT: a framework for building per-application library operating systems

Efficient use of high speed hardware requires operating system components be customized to the application work- load. Our general purpose operating systems are ill-suited for this task. We present EbbRT, a framework for constructing per-application library operating systems for cloud applications. The primary objective of EbbRT is to enable high-performance in a tractable and maintainable fashion. This paper describes the design and implementation of EbbRT, and evaluates its ability to improve the performance of common cloud applications. The evaluation of the EbbRT prototype demonstrates memcached, run within a VM, can outperform memcached run on an unvirtualized Linux. The prototype evaluation also demonstrates an 14% performance improvement of a V8 JavaScript engine benchmark, and a node.js webserver that achieves a 50% reduction in 99th percentile latency compared to it run on Linux

An edge-queued datagram service for all datacenter traffic

Modern datacenters support a wide range of protocols and in-network switch enhancements aimed at improving performance. Unfortunately, the resulting protocols often do not coexist gracefully because they inevitably interact via queuing in the network. In this paper we describe EQDS, a new datagram service for datacenters that moves almost all of the queuing out of the core network and into the sending host. This enables it to support multiple (conflicting) higher layer protocols, while only sending packets into the network according to any receiver-driven credit scheme. EQDS can transparently speed up legacy TCP and RDMA stacks, and enables transport protocol evolution, while benefiting from future switch enhancements without needing to modify higher layer stacks. We show through simulation and multiple implementations that EQDS can reduce FCT of legacy TCP by 2x, improve the NVMeOF-RDMA throughput by 30%, and safely run TCP alongside RDMA on the same network

An MPI-IO In-Memory driver for non-volatile pooled memory of the Kove XPD

Many scientific applications are limited by the performance offered by parallel file systems. SSD based burst buffers provide significant better performance than HDD backed storage but at the expense of capacity. Clearly, achieving wire-speed of the interconnect and predictable low latency I/O is the holy grail of storage. In-memory storage promises to provide optimal performance exceeding SSD based solutions. Kove®’s XPD® offers pooled memory for cluster systems. This remote memory is asynchronously backed up to storage devices of the XPDs and considered to be non-volatile. Albeit the system offers various APIs to access this memory such as treating it as a block device, it does not allow to expose it as file system that offers POSIX or MPI-IO semantics. In this paper, we (1) describe the XPD-MPIIO-driver which supports the scale-out architecture of the XPDs. This MPI-agnostic driver enables high-level libraries to utilize the XPD’s memory as storage. (2) A thorough performance evaluation of the XPD is conducted. This includes scale-out testing of the infrastructure and “metadata” operations but also performance variability. We show that the driver and storage architecture is able to nearly saturate wire-speed of Infiniband (60+ GiB/s with 14FDR links) while providing low latency and little performance variability

Evaluating the benefits of key-value databases for scientific applications

The convergence of Big Data applications with High-Performance Computing requires new methodologies to store, manage and process large amounts of information. Traditional storage solutions are unable to scale and that results in complex coding strategies. For example, the brain atlas of the Human Brain Project has the challenge to process large amounts of high-resolution brain images. Given the computing needs, we study the effects of replacing a traditional storage system with a distributed Key-Value database on a cell segmentation application. The original code uses HDF5 files on GPFS through an intricate interface, imposing synchronizations. On the other hand, by using Apache Cassandra or ScyllaDB through Hecuba, the application code is greatly simplified. Thanks to the Key-Value data model, the number of synchronizations is reduced and the time dedicated to I/O scales when increasing the number of nodes.This project/research has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under the Speci c Grant Agreement No. 720270 (Human Brain Project SGA1) and the Speci c Grant Agreement No. 785907 (Human Brain Project SGA2). This work has also been supported by the Spanish Government (SEV2015-0493), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contract TIN2015-65316-P), and by Generalitat de Catalunya (contract 2017-SGR-1414).Postprint (author's final draft