Many-Task Computing and Blue Waters

This report discusses many-task computing (MTC) generically and in the context of the proposed Blue Waters systems, which is planned to be the largest NSF-funded supercomputer when it begins production use in 2012. The aim of this report is to inform the BW project about MTC, including understanding aspects of MTC applications that can be used to characterize the domain and understanding the implications of these aspects to middleware and policies. Many MTC applications do not neatly fit the stereotypes of high-performance computing (HPC) or high-throughput computing (HTC) applications. Like HTC applications, by definition MTC applications are structured as graphs of discrete tasks, with explicit input and output dependencies forming the graph edges. However, MTC applications have significant features that distinguish them from typical HTC applications. In particular, different engineering constraints for hardware and software must be met in order to support these applications. HTC applications have traditionally run on platforms such as grids and clusters, through either workflow systems or parallel programming systems. MTC applications, in contrast, will often demand a short time to solution, may be communication intensive or data intensive, and may comprise very short tasks. Therefore, hardware and software for MTC must be engineered to support the additional communication and I/O and must minimize task dispatch overheads. The hardware of large-scale HPC systems, with its high degree of parallelism and support for intensive communication, is well suited for MTC applications. However, HPC systems often lack a dynamic resource-provisioning feature, are not ideal for task communication via the file system, and have an I/O system that is not optimized for MTC-style applications. Hence, additional software support is likely to be required to gain full benefit from the HPC hardware

Structure-Aware Dynamic Scheduler for Parallel Machine Learning

Training large machine learning (ML) models with many variables or parameters can take a long time if one employs sequential procedures even with stochastic updates. A natural solution is to turn to distributed computing on a cluster; however, naive, unstructured parallelization of ML algorithms does not usually lead to a proportional speedup and can even result in divergence, because dependencies between model elements can attenuate the computational gains from parallelization and compromise correctness of inference. Recent efforts toward this issue have benefited from exploiting the static, a priori block structures residing in ML algorithms. In this paper, we take this path further by exploring the dynamic block structures and workloads therein present during ML program execution, which offers new opportunities for improving convergence, correctness, and load balancing in distributed ML. We propose and showcase a general-purpose scheduler, STRADS, for coordinating distributed updates in ML algorithms, which harnesses the aforementioned opportunities in a systematic way. We provide theoretical guarantees for our scheduler, and demonstrate its efficacy versus static block structures on Lasso and Matrix Factorization

Energy and labor aware production scheduling for industrial demand response using adaptive multi-objective memetic algorithm

Price-based demand response stimulates factories to adapt their power consumption patterns to time-sensitive electricity prices to reduce cost. This paper introduces a multi-objective optimization model which schedules job processing, machine idle modes, and human workers under real-time electricity pricing. Beyond existing models, labor is considered due to the trade-off between energy and labor costs. An adaptive multi-objective memetic algorithm is proposed to leverage feedback of cross-dominance and stagnation in a search and a prioritized grouping strategy. Thus, adaptive balance remains between exploration of the NSGA-II and exploitation of two mutually complementary local search operators. A case study of an extrusion blow molding process in a plastic bottle manufacturer demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithm. The proposed scheduling method enables intelligent production systems, where production loads and human workers are mutually matched and jointly adapted to real-time electricity pricing for cost-efficient production

고성능 컴퓨팅 시스템에서 버스트 버퍼를 위한 I/O 분리 기법의 실증적 구현

학위논문(석사)--서울대학교 대학원 :공과대학 컴퓨터공학부,2019. 8. 엄현상.To meet the exascale I/O requirements in the High-Performance Computing (HPC), a new I/O subsystem, named Burst Buffer, based on non-volatile memory, has been developed. However, the diverse HPC workloads and the bursty I/O pattern cause severe data fragmentation to SSDs, which creates the need for expensive garbage collection (GC) and also increase the number of bytes actually written to SSD. The new multi-stream feature in SSDs offers an option to reduce the cost of garbage collection. In this paper, we leverage this multi-stream feature to group the I/O streams based on the user IDs and implement this strategy in a burst buffer we call BIOS, short for Burst Buffer with an I/O Separation scheme. Furthermore, to optimize the I/O separation scheme in burst buffer environments, we propose a stream-aware scheduling policy based on burst buffer pools in workload manager and implement the real burst buffer system, BIOS framework, by integrating the BIOS with workload manager. We evaluate the BIOS and framework with a burst buffer I/O traces from Cori Supercomputer including a diverse set of applications. We also disclose and analyze the benefits and limitations of using I/O separation scheme in HPC systems. Experimental results show that the BIOS could improve the performance by 1.44× on average and reduce the Write Amplification Factor (WAF) by up to 1.20×, and prove that the framework can keep on the benefits of the I/O separation scheme in the HPC environment.Abstract Introduction 1 Background and Challenges 5 Burst Buffer 5 Write Amplification in SSDs 6 Multi-streamed SSD 7 Challenges of Multi-stream Feature in Burst Buffers 7 I/O Separation Scheme in Burst Buffer 10 Stream Allocation Criteria 10 Implementation 12 Limitations of User ID-based Stream Allocation 14 BIOS Framework 15 Support in Workload Manager 15 Burst Buffer Pools 16 Stream-Aware Scheduling Policy 18 Workflow of BIOS Framework 20 Evaluation 21 Experiment Setup 21 Evaluation with Synthetic Workload 21 Evaluation with HPC Applications 25 Evaluation with Emulated Workload 27 Evaluation with Different Striping Configuration 29 Evaluation on BIOS Framework 30 Summary and Lessons Learned 33 An I/O Separation Scheme in Burst Buffer 33 Evaluation with Synthetic Workload 33 Evaluation with HPC Applications 33 Evaluation with Emulated Workload 34 Evaluation with Striping Configurations 34 A BIOS Framework 34 Evaluation with Real Burst Buffer Environments 34 Discussion 36 Limited Number of Nodes 36 Advanced BIOS Framework 37 Related work 38 Conclusions 40 Bibliography 42 초록 48Maste

A new model and metaheuristic approach for the energy-based resource-constrained scheduling problem

[EN] This article focuses on obtaining sustainable and energy-efficient solutions for limited resource programming problems. To this end, a model for integrating makespan and energy consumption objectives in multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problems (MRCPSP-ENERGY) is proposed. In addition, a metaheuristic approach for the efficient resolution of these problems is developed. In order to assess the appropriateness of theses proposals, the well-known Project Scheduling Problem Library is extended (called PSPLIB-ENERGY) to include energy consumption to each Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem instance through a realistic mathematical model. This extension provides an alternative to the current trend of numerous research works about optimization and the manufacturing field, which require the inclusion of components to reduce the environmental impact on the decision-making process. PSPLIB-ENERGY is available at http://gps.webs.upv.es/psplib-energy/.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Spanish Government under the research projects TIN2013-46511-C2-1 and TIN2016-80856-R.Morillo-Torres, D.; Barber, F.; Salido, MA. (2017). A new model and metaheuristic approach for the energy-based resource-constrained scheduling problem. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Part B Journal of Engineering Manufacture. 1(1):1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/0954405417711734S1131

Advances in Condition Monitoring, Optimization and Control for Complex Industrial Processes

The book documents 25 papers collected from the Special Issue “Advances in Condition Monitoring, Optimization and Control for Complex Industrial Processes”, highlighting recent research trends in complex industrial processes. The book aims to stimulate the research field and be of benefit to readers from both academic institutes and industrial sectors

Energy-Efficient Virtual Machine Placement using Enhanced Firefly Algorithm

The consolidation of the virtual machines (VMs) helps to optimise the usage of resources and hence reduces the energy consumption in a cloud data centre. VM placement plays an important part in the consolidation of the VMs. The researchers have developed various algorithms for VM placement considering the optimised energy consumption. However, these algorithms lack the use of exploitation mechanism efficiently. This paper addresses VM placement issues by proposing two meta-heuristic algorithms namely, the enhanced modified firefly algorithm (MFF) and the hierarchical cluster based modified firefly algorithm (HCMFF), presenting the comparative analysis relating to energy optimisation. The comparisons are made against the existing honeybee (HB) algorithm, honeybee cluster based technique (HCT) and the energy consumption results of all the participating algorithms confirm that the proposed HCMFF is more efficient than the other algorithms. The simulation study shows that HCMFF consumes 12% less energy than honeybee algorithm, 6% less than HCT algorithm and 2% less than original firefly. The usage of the appropriate algorithm can help in efficient usage of energy in cloud computing