Power efficient job scheduling by predicting the impact of processor manufacturing variability

Modern CPUs suffer from performance and power consumption variability due to the manufacturing process. As a result, systems that do not consider such variability caused by manufacturing issues lead to performance degradations and wasted power. In order to avoid such negative impact, users and system administrators must actively counteract any manufacturing variability. In this work we show that parallel systems benefit from taking into account the consequences of manufacturing variability when making scheduling decisions at the job scheduler level. We also show that it is possible to predict the impact of this variability on specific applications by using variability-aware power prediction models. Based on these power models, we propose two job scheduling policies that consider the effects of manufacturing variability for each application and that ensure that power consumption stays under a system-wide power budget. We evaluate our policies under different power budgets and traffic scenarios, consisting of both single- and multi-node parallel applications, utilizing up to 4096 cores in total. We demonstrate that they decrease job turnaround time, compared to contemporary scheduling policies used on production clusters, up to 31% while saving up to 5.5% energy.Postprint (author's final draft

Topology-aware GPU scheduling for learning workloads in cloud environments

Recent advances in hardware, such as systems with multiple GPUs and their availability in the cloud, are enabling deep learning in various domains including health care, autonomous vehicles, and Internet of Things. Multi-GPU systems exhibit complex connectivity among GPUs and between GPUs and CPUs. Workload schedulers must consider hardware topology and workload communication requirements in order to allocate CPU and GPU resources for optimal execution time and improved utilization in shared cloud environments. This paper presents a new topology-aware workload placement strategy to schedule deep learning jobs on multi-GPU systems. The placement strategy is evaluated with a prototype on a Power8 machine with Tesla P100 cards, showing speedups of up to ≈1.30x compared to state-of-the-art strategies; the proposed algorithm achieves this result by allocating GPUs that satisfy workload requirements while preventing interference. Additionally, a large-scale simulation shows that the proposed strategy provides higher resource utilization and performance in cloud systems.This project is supported by the IBM/BSC Technology Center for Supercomputing collaboration agreement. It has also received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 639595). It is also partially supported by the Ministry of Economy of Spain under contract TIN2015-65316-P and Generalitat de Catalunya under contract 2014SGR1051, by the ICREA Academia program, and by the BSC-CNS Severo Ochoa program (SEV-2015-0493). We thank our IBM Research colleagues Alaa Youssef and Asser Tantawi for the valuable discussions. We also thank SC17 committee member Blair Bethwaite of Monash University for his constructive feedback on the earlier drafts of this paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Energy-Aware Lease Scheduling in Virtualized Data Centers

Energy efficiency has become an important measurement of scheduling algorithms in virtualized data centers. One of the challenges of energy-efficient scheduling algorithms, however, is the trade-off between minimizing energy consumption and satisfying quality of service (e.g. performance, resource availability on time for reservation requests). We consider resource needs in the context of virtualized data centers of a private cloud system, which provides resource leases in terms of virtual machines (VMs) for user applications. In this paper, we propose heuristics for scheduling VMs that address the above challenge. On performance evaluation, simulated results have shown a significant reduction on total energy consumption of our proposed algorithms compared with an existing First-Come-First-Serve (FCFS) scheduling algorithm with the same fulfillment of performance requirements. We also discuss the improvement of energy saving when additionally using migration policies to the above mentioned algorithms.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on High Performance Scientific Computing, March 5-9, 2012, Hanoi, Vietna

InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape

Adaptive Dispatching of Tasks in the Cloud

The increasingly wide application of Cloud Computing enables the consolidation of tens of thousands of applications in shared infrastructures. Thus, meeting the quality of service requirements of so many diverse applications in such shared resource environments has become a real challenge, especially since the characteristics and workload of applications differ widely and may change over time. This paper presents an experimental system that can exploit a variety of online quality of service aware adaptive task allocation schemes, and three such schemes are designed and compared. These are a measurement driven algorithm that uses reinforcement learning, secondly a "sensible" allocation algorithm that assigns jobs to sub-systems that are observed to provide a lower response time, and then an algorithm that splits the job arrival stream into sub-streams at rates computed from the hosts' processing capabilities. All of these schemes are compared via measurements among themselves and with a simple round-robin scheduler, on two experimental test-beds with homogeneous and heterogeneous hosts having different processing capacities.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure