Modeling and optimization of high-performance many-core systems for energy-efficient and reliable computing

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityMany-core systems, ranging from small-scale many-core processors to large-scale high performance computing (HPC) data centers, have become the main trend in computing system design owing to their potential to deliver higher throughput per watt. However, power densities and temperatures increase following the growth in the performance capacity, and bring major challenges in energy efficiency, cooling costs, and reliability. These challenges require a joint assessment of performance, power, and temperature tradeoffs as well as the design of runtime optimization techniques that monitor and manage the interplay among them. This thesis proposes novel modeling and runtime management techniques that evaluate and optimize the performance, energy, and reliability of many-core systems. We first address the energy and thermal challenges in 3D-stacked many-core processors. 3D processors with stacked DRAM have the potential to dramatically improve performance owing to lower memory access latency and higher bandwidth. However, the performance increase may cause 3D systems to exceed the power budgets or create thermal hot spots. In order to provide an accurate analysis and enable the design of efficient management policies, this thesis introduces a simulation framework to jointly analyze performance, power, and temperature for 3D systems. We then propose a runtime optimization policy that maximizes the system performance by characterizing the application behavior and predicting the operating points that satisfy the power and thermal constraints. Our policy reduces the energy-delay product (EDP) by up to 61.9% compared to existing strategies. Performance, cooling energy, and reliability are also critical aspects in HPC data centers. In addition to causing reliability degradation, high temperatures increase the required cooling energy. Communication cost, on the other hand, has a significant impact on system performance in HPC data centers. This thesis proposes a topology-aware technique that maximizes system reliability by selecting between workload clustering and balancing. Our policy improves the system reliability by up to 123.3% compared to existing temperature balancing approaches. We also introduce a job allocation methodology to simultaneously optimize the communication cost and the cooling energy in a data center. Our policy reduces the cooling cost by 40% compared to cooling-aware and performance-aware policies, while achieving comparable performance to performance-aware policy

Power Management Techniques for Data Centers: A Survey

With growing use of internet and exponential growth in amount of data to be stored and processed (known as 'big data'), the size of data centers has greatly increased. This, however, has resulted in significant increase in the power consumption of the data centers. For this reason, managing power consumption of data centers has become essential. In this paper, we highlight the need of achieving energy efficiency in data centers and survey several recent architectural techniques designed for power management of data centers. We also present a classification of these techniques based on their characteristics. This paper aims to provide insights into the techniques for improving energy efficiency of data centers and encourage the designers to invent novel solutions for managing the large power dissipation of data centers.Comment: Keywords: Data Centers, Power Management, Low-power Design, Energy Efficiency, Green Computing, DVFS, Server Consolidatio

EECluster: An Energy-Efficient Tool for managing HPC Clusters

High Performance Computing clusters have become a very important element in research, academic and industrial communities because they are an excellent platform for solving a wide range of problems through parallel and distributed applications. Nevertheless, this high performance comes at the price of consuming large amounts of energy, which combined with notably increasing electricity prices are having an important economical impact, driving up power and cooling costs and forcing IT companies to reduce operation costs. To reduce the high energy consumptions of HPC clusters we propose a tool, named EECluster, for managing the energy-efficient allocation of the cluster resources, that works with both OGE/SGE and PBS/TORQUE Resource Management Systems (RMS) and whose decision-making mechanism is tuned automatically in a machine learning approach. Experimental studies have been made using actual workloads from the Scientific Modelling Cluster at Oviedo University and the academic-cluster used by the Oviedo University for teaching high performance computing subjects to evaluate the results obtained with the adoption of this too

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

EECluster: An Energy-Efficient Tool for managing HPC Clusters

High Performance Computing clusters have become a very important element in research, academic and industrial communities because they are an excellent platform for solving a wide range of problems through parallel and distributed applications. Nevertheless, this high performance comes at the price of consuming large amounts of energy, which combined with notably increasing electricity prices are having an important economical impact, driving up power and cooling costs and forcing IT companies to reduce operation costs. To reduce the high energy consumptions of HPC clusters we propose a tool, named EECluster, for managing the energy-efficient allocation of the cluster resources, that works with both OGE/SGE and PBS/TORQUE Resource Management Systems (RMS) and whose decision-making mechanism is tuned automatically in a machine learning approach. Experimental studies have been made using actual workloads from the Scientific Modelling Cluster at Oviedo University and the academic-cluster used by the Oviedo University for teaching high performance computing subjects to evaluate the results obtained with the adoption of this tool

Cloud computing: survey on energy efficiency

International audienceCloud computing is today’s most emphasized Information and Communications Technology (ICT) paradigm that is directly or indirectly used by almost every online user. However, such great significance comes with the support of a great infrastructure that includes large data centers comprising thousands of server units and other supporting equipment. Their share in power consumption generates between 1.1% and 1.5% of the total electricity use worldwide and is projected to rise even more. Such alarming numbers demand rethinking the energy efficiency of such infrastructures. However, before making any changes to infrastructure, an analysis of the current status is required. In this article, we perform a comprehensive analysis of an infrastructure supporting the cloud computing paradigm with regards to energy efficiency. First, we define a systematic approach for analyzing the energy efficiency of most important data center domains, including server and network equipment, as well as cloud management systems and appliances consisting of a software utilized by end users. Second, we utilize this approach for analyzing available scientific and industrial literature on state-of-the-art practices in data centers and their equipment. Finally, we extract existing challenges and highlight future research directions

Energy-aware scheduling in distributed computing systems

Distributed computing systems, such as data centers, are key for supporting modern computing demands. However, the energy consumption of data centers has become a major concern over the last decade. Worldwide energy consumption in 2012 was estimated to be around 270 TWh, and grim forecasts predict it will quadruple by 2030. Maximizing energy efficiency while also maximizing computing efficiency is a major challenge for modern data centers. This work addresses this challenge by scheduling the operation of modern data centers, considering a multi-objective approach for simultaneously optimizing both efficiency objectives. Multiple data center scenarios are studied, such as scheduling a single data center and scheduling a federation of several geographically-distributed data centers. Mathematical models are formulated for each scenario, considering the modeling of their most relevant components such as computing resources, computing workload, cooling system, networking, and green energy generators, among others. A set of accurate heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms are designed for addressing the scheduling problem. These scheduling algorithms are comprehensively studied, and compared with each other, using statistical tools to evaluate their efficacy when addressing realistic workloads and scenarios. Experimental results show the designed scheduling algorithms are able to significantly increase the energy efficiency of data centers when compared to traditional scheduling methods, while providing a diverse set of trade-off solutions regarding the computing efficiency of the data center. These results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithmic approaches for data center infrastructures.Los sistemas informáticos distribuidos, como los centros de datos, son clave para satisfacer la demanda informática moderna. Sin embargo, su consumo de energético se ha convertido en una gran preocupación. Se estima que mundialmente su consumo energético rondó los 270 TWh en el año 2012, y algunos prevén que este consumo se cuadruplicará para el año 2030. Maximizar simultáneamente la eficiencia energética y computacional de los centros de datos es un desafío crítico. Esta tesis aborda dicho desafío mediante la planificación de la operativa del centro de datos considerando un enfoque multiobjetivo para optimizar simultáneamente ambos objetivos de eficiencia. En esta tesis se estudian múltiples variantes del problema, desde la planificación de un único centro de datos hasta la de una federación de múltiples centros de datos geográficmentea distribuidos. Para esto, se formulan modelos matemáticos para cada variante del problema, modelado sus componentes más relevantes, como: recursos computacionales, carga de trabajo, refrigeración, redes, energía verde, etc. Para resolver el problema de planificación planteado, se diseñan un conjunto de algoritmos heurísticos y metaheurísticos. Estos son estudiados exhaustivamente y su eficiencia es evaluada utilizando una batería de herramientas estadísticas. Los resultados experimentales muestran que los algoritmos de planificación diseñados son capaces de aumentar significativamente la eficiencia energética de un centros de datos en comparación con métodos tradicionales planificación. A su vez, los métodos propuestos proporcionan un conjunto diverso de soluciones con diferente nivel de compromiso respecto a la eficiencia computacional del centro de datos. Estos resultados confirman la eficacia del enfoque algorítmico propuesto

Energy-efficient and thermal-aware resource management for heterogeneous datacenters

International audienceWe propose in this paper to study the energy-, thermal- and performance-aware resource management in heterogeneous datacenters. Witnessing the continuous development of heterogeneity in datacenters, we are confronted with their different behaviors in terms of performance, power consumption and thermal dissipation: indeed, heterogeneity at server level lies both in the computing infrastructure (computing power, electrical power consumption) and in the heat removal systems (different enclosure, fans, thermal sinks). Also the physical locations of the servers become important with heterogeneity since some servers can (over)heat others. While many studies address independently these parameters (most of the time performance and power or energy), we show in this paper the necessity to tackle all these aspects for an optimal resource management of the computing resources. This leads to improved energy usage in a heterogeneous datacenter including the cooling of the computer rooms. We build our approach on the concept of heat distribution matrix to handle the mutual influence of the servers, in heterogeneous environments, which is novel in this context. We propose a heuristic to solve the server placement problem and we design a generic greedy framework for the online scheduling problem. We derive several single-objective heuristics (for performance, energy, cooling) and a novel fuzzy-based priority mechanism to handle their tradeoffs. Finally, we show results using extensive simulations fed with actual measurements on heterogeneous servers