DVFS governor for HPC: Higher, Faster, Greener

International audienceIn High Performance Computing, being respectful of the environment is usually secondary compared to performance: The faster, the better. As Exascale computing is in the spotlight, electric power concerns arise as current exascale projects might need too much power to even boot. A recent incentive (Exascale at maximum 20MW) shows that reality is catching up with HPC center designers. Beyond classical works on hardware infrastructure or at the middleware level, we do believe that system-level solutions have great potential for energy reduction. Moreover energy-reduction has often been neglected by the HPC community that focus mainly on raw computing performance. In the literature, energy savings is achieved mainly by two means: Either processor load is the only metric taken into account to reduce processors frequency and to ensure no impact on raw performances, Or processor frequency is managed only at task level outside the critical path. In this article we show that designing and implementing a DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling) mechanism based on instantaneous system values (here network activity) can save up to 25% of energy consumption while reducing marginally performance. In several cases, reducing energy consumption also leads to an increase in performances because of the thermal budget of recent processors. This work is validated with real experiments on a Linux cluster using the NAS Parallel Benchmark (NPB)

Energy aware clouds scheduling using anti-load balancing algorithm : EACAB

International audienceCloud computing is a highly scalable and cost-effective infrastructure for running HPC, enterprise and Web applications. However rapid growth of the demand for computational power by scientific, business and web- applications has led to the creation of large-scale data centers consuming enormous amounts of electrical power. Hence, energy-efficient solutions are required to minimize their energy consumption. The objective of our approach is to reduce data center’s total energy consumption by controlling cloud applications’ overall resource usage while guarantying service level agreement. This article presents Energy aware clouds scheduling using anti-load balancing algorithm (EACAB). The proposed algorithm works by associating a credit value with each node. The credit of a node depends on its affinity to its jobs, its current workload and its communication behavior. Energy savings are achieved by continuous consolidation of VMs according to current utilization of resources, virtual network topologies established between VMs and thermal state of computing nodes. The experiment results show that the cloud application energy consumption and energy efficiency is being improved effectively

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

Valgreen: an Application's Energy Profiler

International audienceThe popularity of hand-held and portable devices put the energy aware computing in evidence. The need for long time batteries surpasses the hardware manufacturer, impacting the operational system policies and software development. Power modeling of applications has been studied during the last years and can be used to estimate their total energy. In order to aid the programmer to implement energy efficient algorithms, this paper introduces an application's energy profiler, namely Valgreen, which exploits the battery's information in order to generate an architecture independent power model through a calibration process

Energy Consumption Library

International audienceThe energy consumption of a computing system depends not only on its architecture, but also on its usage. This paper describes the Energy Consumption Library (libec), a modular library of sensors and power estimators, which do not depend on wattmeter to measure the power dissipated by a machine and/or the applications that it executes, etc. In addition, four use cases are used to demonstrate some of the library's capabilities

Range-free selective anchor node center of the smallest communication overlap polygon localization algorithm in wireless networks

International audienceThis paper presents a range-free selective anchor node center of the smallest communication overlap polygon localization algorithm in wireless networks. The algorithm is range-free which does not require ranging devices. To estimate the location of unknown (location unaware) nodes it uses node connectivity based on selected anchor (location aware) nodes. The algorithm first selects appropriate anchor nodes. Then, the True Intersection Points (TIPs) constituting the vertices of the smallest communication overlap polygon (SCOP) of these selected anchor nodes' communication ranges are found. Finally, the location of the unknown node is estimated at the center of the SCOP which is formed from these TIPs. The algorithm performance is evaluated using MatLab simulation and compares favorably to state-of-the-art algorithms: Centroid, improved version of CPE, Mid-perpendicular and CSCOP localization algorithms. The results show the proposed algorithm outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms in location accuracy and it has reasonable computational complexity

A User Friendly Phase Detection Methodology for HPC Systems' Analysis

International audienceA wide array of today's high performance computing (HPC) applications exhibits recurring behaviours or execution phases throughout their run-time. Accurate detection of program phases allows reconfiguring the system for a better power/performance trade off; and can reduce the simulation time of programs by identifying regions of code whose performance is critical to the entire program. Program phases are also reflected in different behaviours the system goes through or system phases, which can be used as an alternative means of program phase detection for users lacking expertise. In this paper, we present an execution vector based (EV-based) phase detection, which is an on-line methodology for detecting phases in the behaviour of a HPC system and determining execution points that correspond to these phases. We also present a methodology for defining a small set of EVs representative of the system's behaviour over a fixed period of time and show that EV-based phase detection identifies recurring phases. Our methodology is illustrated with benchmarks and a real life application

e-Flooding: Crisis Management through Two Temporal Loops

Floods, particularly fast ones, are recurrent natural disasters with a large impact on people and infrastructures. In order to mitigate their impact most countries created regulatory frameworks to coordinate the large number of actors participating to the response of these crises. Several levels from rescue to infrastructure restoration are involved. This article proposes to improve the management of risk and resilience in areas subject to flash floods. The innovative autonomic approach presented in this article is twofold: A short-term feedback loop using a large range of information to help managing the current flood; A long-term feedback loop aiming at improving the resilience of the area to reduce the impact of future crises. The originality of these two loops consists in their link which helps improving the quality of both by feeding each other. This article also describes a scenario showing several benefits of the proposed approach

DNA-inspired Scheme for Building the Energy Profile of HPC Systems

International audienceEnergy usage is becoming a challenge for the design of next generation large scale distributed systems. This paper explores an inno- vative approach of profiling such systems. It proposes a DNA-like solution without making any assumptions on the running applications and used hardware. This profiling based on internal counters usage and energy monitoring allows to isolate specific phases during the execution and enables some energy consumption control and energy usage prediction. First experimental validations of the system modeling are presented and analyzed

A Runtime Framework for Energy Efficient HPC Systems Without a Priori Knowledge of Applications

International audienceThe rising computing demands of scientific endeavours often require the creation and management of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems for running experiments and processing vast amounts of data. These HPC systems generally operate at peak performance, consuming a large quantity of electricity, even though their workload varies over time. Understanding the behavioural patterns i.e., phases) of HPC systems during their use is key to adjust performance to resource demand and hence improve the energy efficiency. In this paper, we describe (i) a method to detect phases of an HPC system based on its workload, and (ii) a partial phase recognition technique that works cooperatively with on-the-fly dynamic management. We implement a prototype that guides the use of energy saving capabilities to demonstrate the benefits of our approach. Experimental results reveal the effectiveness of the phase detection method under real-life workload and benchmarks. A comparison with baseline unmanaged execution shows that the partial phase recognition technique saves up to 15% of energy with less than 1% performance degradation