Motivation: Traditional computational cluster schedulers are based on user inputs and run time needs request for memory and CPU, not IO. Heavily IO bound task run times, like ones seen in many big data and bioinformatics problems, are dependent on the IO subsystems scheduling and are problematic for cluster resource scheduling. The problematic rescheduling of IO intensive and errant tasks is a lost resource. Understanding the conditions in both successful and failed tasks and differentiating them could provide knowledge to enhancing cluster scheduling and intelligent resource optimization. Results: We analyze a production computational cluster contributing 6.7 thousand CPU hours to research over two years. Through this analysis we develop a machine learning task profiling agent for clusters that attempts to predict failures between identically provision requested tasks.
Larger scale system monitoring of HPC and the Open Science Grid @cite_24 have used such systems as OVIS @cite_11 or TACC Stats @cite_1 . OVIS uses a Bayesian inference scheme to dynamically infer models for the normal behavior of a system and to determine bounds on the probability of values evinced in the system. OVIS addresses hardware related failure issues and system level performance analysis on systems based on MTTF analysis of a given system.
@cite_24 @cite_1 @cite_11
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Traditional cluster monitoring approaches consider nodes in singleton, using manufacturer-specified extreme limits as thresholds for failure "prediction". We have developed a tool, OVIS, for monitoring and analysis of large computational platforms which, instead, uses a statistical approach to characterize single device behaviors from those of a large number of statistically similar devices. Baseline capabilities of OVIS include the visual display of deterministic information about state variables (e.g., temperature, CPU utilization, fan speed) and their aggregate statistics. Visual consideration of the cluster as a comparative ensemble, rather than as singleton nodes, is an easy and useful method for tuning cluster configuration and determining effects of realtime changes. Additionally, OVIS incorporates a novel Bayesian inference scheme to dynamically infer models for the normal behavior of a system and to determine bounds on the probability of values evinced in the system. Individual node values that are unlikely given the current applicable model are flagged as aberrant. This can be a much earlier indicator of problems than waiting for the crossing of some threshold that is necessarily set high to preclude too many false alarms. We present OVIS and discuss its applications in cluster configuration and environmental tuning and to abnormality and problem discovery in our production clusters. In large-scale networked computing systems, component failures become norms instead of exceptions. Failure prediction is a crucial technique for self-managing resource burdens. Failure events in coalition systems exhibit strong correlations in time and space domain. In this paper, we develop a spherical covariance model with an adjustable timescale parameter to quantify the temporal correlation and a stochastic model to describe spatial correlation. We further utilize the information of application allocation to discover more correlations among failure instances. We cluster failure events based on their correlations and predict their future occurrences. We implemented a failure prediction framework, called PREdictor of Failure Events Correlated Temporal-Spatially (hPREFECTs), which explores correlations among failures and forecasts the time-between-failure of future instances. We evaluate the performance of hPREFECTs in both offline prediction of failure by using the Los Alamos HPC traces and online prediction in an institute-wide clusters coalition environment. Experimental results show the system achieves more than 76 accuracy in offline prediction and more than 70 accuracy in online prediction during the time from May 2006 to April 2007. As the failure frequency is increasing with the components count in modern and future supercomputers, resilience is becoming critical for extreme scale systems. The association of failure prediction with proactive checkpointing seeks to reduce the effect of failures in the execution time of parallel applications. Unfortunately, proactive checkpointing does not systematically avoid restarting from scratch. To mitigate this issue, failure prediction and proactive checkpointing can be coupled with periodic checkpointing. However, blind use of these techniques does not always improves system efficiency, because everyone of them comes with a mix of overheads and benefits. In order to study and understand the combination of these techniques and their improvement in the system's efficiency, we developed: (i) a prototype combining state of the art failure prediction, fast proactive checkpointing and preventive checkpointing; (ii) a mathematical model that reflects the expected computing efficiency of the combination and computes the optimal checkpointing interval in this context; (iii) a discrete event simulator to evaluate the computing efficiency of the combination for system parameters corresponding to the current and projected large scale HPC systems. We evaluate our proposed technique on a large supercomputer (i.e. TSUBAME2) with production-level HPC applications and we show that failure prediction, proactive and preventive checkpointing can be coupled successfully, imposing only about 2 to 6 of overhead in comparison with preventive checkpointing only. Moreover, our model-based simulations show that the optimal solution improves the computing efficiency up to 30 in comparison with classic periodic checkpointing. We show that the prediction recall has a much higher impact on execution efficiency than the prediction precision. This result suggests that researchers on failure prediction algorithms should focus on improving the recall. We also show that the combination of these techniques can significantly improve (by a factor 2, for a particular configuration) the mean time between failures (MTBF) perceived by the application. The rising computing demands of scientific endeavors 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 behavioral 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.