Paul Carpenter

Isaac Boixaderas, Sergi Moré, Javier Bartolome et al.

Scaling to larger systems, with current levels of reliability, requires cost-effective methods to mitigate hardware failures. One of the main causes of hardware failure is an uncorrected error in memory, which terminates the current job and wastes all computation since the last checkpoint. This paper presents the first adaptive method for triggering uncorrected error mitigation. It uses a prediction approach that considers the likelihood of an uncorrected error and its current potential cost. The method is based on reinforcement learning, and the only user-defined parameters are the mitigation cost and whether the job can be restarted from a mitigation point. We evaluate our method using classical machine learning metrics together with a cost-benefit analysis, which compares the cost of mitigation actions with the benefits from mitigating some of the errors. On two years of production logs from the MareNostrum supercomputer, our method reduces lost compute time by 54% compared with no mitigation and is just 6% below the optimal Oracle method. All source code is open source.

Felippe V. Zacarias, Vinicius Petrucci, Rajiv Nishtala et al.

Many HPC applications suffer from a bottleneck in the shared caches, instruction execution units, I/O or memory bandwidth, even though the remaining resources may be underutilized. It is hard for developers and runtime systems to ensure that all critical resources are fully exploited by a single application, so an attractive technique for increasing HPC system utilization is to colocate multiple applications on the same server. When applications share critical resources, however, contention on shared resources may lead to reduced application performance. In this paper, we show that server efficiency can be improved by first modeling the expected performance degradation of colocated applications based on measured hardware performance counters, and then exploiting the model to determine an optimized mix of colocated applications. This paper presents a new intelligent resource manager and makes the following contributions: (1) a new machine learning model to predict the performance degradation of colocated applications based on hardware counters and (2) an intelligent scheduling scheme deployed on an existing resource manager to enable application co-scheduling with minimum performance degradation. Our results show that our approach achieves performance improvements of 7% (avg) and 12% (max) compared to the standard policy commonly used by existing job managers.