DBRS: Directed Acyclic Graph based Reliable Scheduling Approach in Large Scale Computing

In large scale environments, scheduling presents a significant challenge because it is an NP-hard problem. There are basically two types of task in execution- dependent task and independent task. The execution of dependent task must follow a strict order because output of one activity is typically the input of another. In this paper, a reliable fault tolerant approach is proposed for scheduling of dependent task in large scale computing environments. The workflow of dependent task is represented with the help of a DAG (directed acyclic graph). The proposed methodology is evaluated over various parameters by applying it in a large scale computing environment- ‘grid computing’. Grid computing is a high performance computing for solving complex, large and data intensive problems in various fields. The result analysis shows that the proposed DAG based reliable scheduling (DBRS) approach increases the performance of system by decreasing the makespan, number of failures and increasing performance improvement ratio (PIR)

On the complexity of scheduling checkpoints for computational workflows

This paper deals with the complexity of scheduling computational workflows in the presence of Exponential failures. When such a failure occurs, rollback and recovery is used so that the execution can resume from the last checkpointed state. The goal is to minimize the expected execution time, and we have to decide in which order to execute the tasks, and whether to checkpoint or not after the completion of each given task. We show that this scheduling problem is strongly NP-complete, and propose a (polynomial-time) dynamic programming algorithm for the case where the application graph is a linear chain. These results lay the theoretical foundations of the problem, and constitute a prerequisite before discussing scheduling strategies for arbitrary DAGS of moldable tasks subject to general failure distributions

Understanding error log event sequence for failure analysis

Due to the evolvement of large-scale parallel systems, they are mostly employed for mission critical applications. The anticipation and accommodation of failure occurrences is crucial to the design. A commonplace feature of these large-scale systems is failure, and they cannot be treated as exception. The system state is mostly captured through the logs. The need for proper understanding of these error logs for failure analysis is extremely important. This is because the logs contain the “health” information of the system. In this paper we design an approach that seeks to find similarities in patterns of these logs events that leads to failures. Our experiment shows that several root causes of soft lockup failures could be traced through the logs. We capture the behavior of failure inducing patterns and realized that the logs pattern of failure and non-failure patterns are dissimilar.Keywords: Failure Sequences; Cluster; Error Logs; HPC; Similarit

Checkpointing algorithms and fault prediction

This paper deals with the impact of fault prediction techniques on checkpointing strategies. We extend the classical first-order analysis of Young and Daly in the presence of a fault prediction system, characterized by its recall and its precision. In this framework, we provide an optimal algorithm to decide when to take predictions into account, and we derive the optimal value of the checkpointing period. These results allow to analytically assess the key parameters that impact the performance of fault predictors at very large scale.Comment: Supported in part by ANR Rescue. Published in Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1207.693

Hybrid ant colony system algorithm for static and dynamic job scheduling in grid computing

Grid computing is a distributed system with heterogeneous infrastructures. Resource management system (RMS) is one of the most important components which has great influence on the grid computing performance. The main part of RMS is the scheduler algorithm which has the responsibility to map submitted tasks to available resources. The complexity of scheduling problem is considered as a nondeterministic polynomial complete (NP-complete) problem and therefore, an intelligent algorithm is required to achieve better scheduling solution. One of the prominent intelligent algorithms is ant colony system (ACS) which is implemented widely to solve various types of scheduling problems. However, ACS suffers from stagnation problem in medium and large size grid computing system. ACS is based on exploitation and exploration mechanisms where the exploitation is sufficient but the exploration has a deficiency. The exploration in ACS is based on a random approach without any strategy. This study proposed four hybrid algorithms between ACS, Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Tabu Search (TS) algorithms to enhance the ACS performance. The algorithms are ACS(GA), ACS+GA, ACS(TS), and ACS+TS. These proposed hybrid algorithms will enhance ACS in terms of exploration mechanism and solution refinement by implementing low and high levels hybridization of ACS, GA, and TS algorithms. The proposed algorithms were evaluated against twelve metaheuristic algorithms in static (expected time to compute model) and dynamic (distribution pattern) grid computing environments. A simulator called ExSim was developed to mimic the static and dynamic nature of the grid computing. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms outperform ACS in terms of best makespan values. Performance of ACS(GA), ACS+GA, ACS(TS), and ACS+TS are better than ACS by 0.35%, 2.03%, 4.65% and 6.99% respectively for static environment. For dynamic environment, performance of ACS(GA), ACS+GA, ACS+TS, and ACS(TS) are better than ACS by 0.01%, 0.56%, 1.16%, and 1.26% respectively. The proposed algorithms can be used to schedule tasks in grid computing with better performance in terms of makespan

Impact of fault prediction on checkpointing strategies

This paper deals with the impact of fault prediction techniques on checkpointing strategies. We extend the classical analysis of Young and Daly in the presence of a fault prediction system, which is characterized by its recall and its precision, and which provides either exact or window-based time predictions. We succeed in deriving the optimal value of the checkpointing period (thereby minimizing the waste of resource usage due to checkpoint overhead) in all scenarios. These results allow to analytically assess the key parameters that impact the performance of fault predictors at very large scale. In addition, the results of this analytical evaluation are nicely corroborated by a comprehensive set of simulations, thereby demonstrating the validity of the model and the accuracy of the results.Comment: 20 page

Tolérance aux pannes dans des environnements de calcul parallèle et distribué (optimisation des stratégies de sauvegarde/reprise et ordonnancement)

Le passage de l'échelle des nouvelles plates-formes de calcul parallèle et distribué soulève de nombreux défis scientifiques. À terme, il est envisageable de voir apparaître des applications composées d'un milliard de processus exécutés sur des systèmes à un million de coeurs. Cette augmentation fulgurante du nombre de processeurs pose un défi de résilience incontournable, puisque ces applications devraient faire face à plusieurs pannes par jours. Pour assurer une bonne exécution dans ce contexte hautement perturbé par des interruptions, de nombreuses techniques de tolérance aux pannes telle que l'approche de sauvegarde et reprise (checkpoint) ont été imaginées et étudiées. Cependant, l'intégration de ces approches de tolérance aux pannes dans le couple formé par l'application et la plate-forme d'exécution soulève des problématiques d'optimisation pour déterminer le compromis entre le surcoût induit par le mécanisme de tolérance aux pannes d'un coté et l'impact des pannes sur l'exécution d'un autre coté. Dans la première partie de cette thèse nous concevons deux modèles de performance stochastique (minimisation de l'impact des pannes et du surcoût des points de sauvegarde sur l'espérance du temps de complétion de l'exécution en fonction de la distribution d'inter-arrivées des pannes). Dans la première variante l'objectif est la minimisation de l'espérance du temps de complétion en considérant que l'application est de nature préemptive. Nous exhibons dans ce cas de figure tout d'abord une expression analytique de la période de sauvegarde optimale quand le taux de panne et le surcoût des points de sauvegarde sont constants. Par contre dans le cas où le taux de panne ou les surcoûts des points de sauvegarde sont arbitraires nous présentons une approche numérique pour calculer l'ordonnancement optimal des points de sauvegarde. Dans la deuxième variante, l'objectif est la minimisation de l'espérance de la quantité totale de temps perdu avant la première panne en considérant les applications de nature non-préemptive. Dans ce cas de figure, nous démontrons tout d'abord que si les surcoûts des points sauvegarde sont arbitraires alors le problème du meilleur ordonnancement des points de sauvegarde est NP-complet. Ensuite, nous exhibons un schéma de programmation dynamique pour calculer un ordonnancement optimal. Dans la deuxième partie de cette thèse nous nous focalisons sur la conception des stratégies d'ordonnancement tolérant aux pannes qui optimisent à la fois le temps de complétion de la dernière tâche et la probabilité de succès de l'application. Nous mettons en évidence dans ce cas de figure qu'en fonction de la nature de la distribution de pannes, les deux objectifs à optimiser sont tantôt antagonistes, tantôt congruents. Ensuite en fonction de la nature de distribution de pannes nous donnons des approches d'ordonnancement avec des ratios de performance garantis par rapport aux deux objectifs.The parallel computing platforms available today are increasingly larger. Typically the emerging parallel platforms will be composed of several millions of CPU cores running up to a billion of threads. This intensive growth of the number of parallel threads will make the application subject to more and more failures. Consequently it is necessary to develop efficient strategies providing safe and reliable completion for HPC parallel applications. Checkpointing is one of the most popular and efficient technique for developing fault-tolerant applications on such a context. However, checkpoint operations are costly in terms of time, computation and network communications. This will certainly affect the global performance of the application. In the first part of this thesis, we propose a performance model that expresses formally the checkpoint scheduling problem. Two variants of the problem have been considered. In the first variant, the objective is the minimization of the expected completion time. Under this model we prove that when the failure rate and the checkpoint cost are constant the optimal checkpoint strategy is necessarily periodic. For the general problem when the failure rate and the checkpoint cost are arbitrary we provide a numerical solution for the problem. In the second variant if the problem, we exhibit the tradeoff between the impact of the checkpoints operations and the lost computation due to failures. In particular, we prove that the checkpoint scheduling problem is NP-hard even in the simple case of uniform failure distribution. We also present a dynamic programming scheme for determining the optimal checkpointing times in all the variants of the problem. In the second part of this thesis, we design several fault tolerant scheduling algorithms that minimize the application makespan and in the same time maximize the application reliability. Mainly, in this part we point out that the growth rate of the failure distribution determines the relationship between both objectives. More precisely we show that when the failure rate is decreasing the two objectives are antagonist. In the second hand when the failure rate is increasing both objective are congruent. Finally, we provide approximation algorithms for both failure rate cases.SAVOIE-SCD - Bib.électronique (730659901) / SudocGRENOBLE1/INP-Bib.électronique (384210012) / SudocGRENOBLE2/3-Bib.électronique (384219901) / SudocSudocFranceF

Towards efficient error detection in large-scale HPC systems

The need for computer systems to be reliable has increasingly become important as the dependence on their accurate functioning by users increases. The failure of these systems could very costly in terms of time and money. In as much as system's designers try to design fault-free systems, it is practically impossible to have such systems as different factors could affect them. In order to achieve system's reliability, fault tolerance methods are usually deployed; these methods help the system to produce acceptable results even in the presence of faults. Root cause analysis, a dependability method for which the causes of failures are diagnosed for the purpose of correction or prevention of future occurrence is less efficient. It is reactive and would not prevent the first failure from occurring. For this reason, methods with predictive capabilities are preferred; failure prediction methods are employed to predict the potential failures to enable preventive measures to be applied. Most of the predictive methods have been supervised, requiring accurate knowledge of the system's failures, errors and faults. However, with changing system components and system updates, supervised methods are ineffective. Error detection methods allows error patterns to be detected early to enable preventive methods to be applied. Performing this detection in an unsupervised way could be more effective as changes to systems or updates would less affect such a solution. In this thesis, we introduced an unsupervised approach to detecting error patterns in a system using its data. More specifically, the thesis investigates the use of both event logs and resource utilization data to detect error patterns. It addresses both the spatial and temporal aspects of achieving system dependability. The proposed unsupervised error detection method has been applied on real data from two different production systems. The results are positive; showing average detection F-measure of about 75%