DCDB Wintermute: Enabling Online and Holistic Operational Data Analytics on HPC Systems

As we approach the exascale era, the size and complexity of HPC systems continues to increase, raising concerns about their manageability and sustainability. For this reason, more and more HPC centers are experimenting with fine-grained monitoring coupled with Operational Data Analytics (ODA) to optimize efficiency and effectiveness of system operations. However, while monitoring is a common reality in HPC, there is no well-stated and comprehensive list of requirements, nor matching frameworks, to support holistic and online ODA. This leads to insular ad-hoc solutions, each addressing only specific aspects of the problem. In this paper we propose Wintermute, a novel generic framework to enable online ODA on large-scale HPC installations. Its design is based on the results of a literature survey of common operational requirements. We implement Wintermute on top of the holistic DCDB monitoring system, offering a large variety of configuration options to accommodate the varying requirements of ODA applications. Moreover, Wintermute is based on a set of logical abstractions to ease the configuration of models at a large scale and maximize code re-use. We highlight Wintermute's flexibility through a series of practical case studies, each targeting a different aspect of the management of HPC systems, and then demonstrate the small resource footprint of our implementation.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 29th ACM International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC 2020

Service Level Objectives via C++11 Attributes

In recent years, increasing attention has been given to the possibility of guaranteeing Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to users about their applications, either regarding performance or power consumption. SLO can be implemented for parallel applications since they can provide many control knobs (e.g., the number of threads to use, the clock frequency of the cores, etc.) to tune the performance and power consumption of the application. Different from most of the existing approaches, we target sequential stream processing applications by proposing a solution based on C++ annotations. The user specifies which parts of the code to parallelize and what type of requirements should be enforced on that part of the code. Our solution first automatically parallelizes the annotated code and then applies self-adaptation approaches at run-time to enforce the user-expressed objectives. We ran experiments on different real-world applications, showing its simplicity and effectiveness