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At least 199 records · Page 11

Implementation of a practical Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithm in PyBioNetFit

Abstract Summary Bayesian inference in biological modeling commonly relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of a multidimensional and non-Gaussian posterior distribution that is not analytically tractable. Here, we present the implementation of a practical MCMC method in the open-source software package PyBioNetFit (PyBNF), which is designed to support parameterization of mathematical models for biological systems. The new MCMC method, am, incorporates an adaptive move proposal distribution. For warm starts, sampling can be initiated at a specified location in parameter space and with a multivariate Gaussian proposal distribution defined initially by a specified covariance matrix. Multiple chains can be generated in parallel using a computer cluster. We demonstrate that am can be used to successfully solve real-world Bayesian inference problems, including forecasting of new Coronavirus Disease 2019 case detection with Bayesian quantification of forecast uncertainty. Availability and implementation PyBNF version 1.1.9, the first stable release with am, is available at PyPI and can be installed using the pip package-management system on platforms that have a working installation of Python 3. PyBNF relies on libRoadRunner and BioNetGen for simulations (e.g. numerical integration of ordinary differential equations defined in SBML or BNGL files) and Dask.Distributed for task scheduling on Linux computer clusters. The Python source code can be freely downloaded/cloned from GitHub and used and modified under terms of the BSD-3 license (https://github.com/lanl/pybnf). Online documentation covering installation/usage is available (https://pybnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). A tutorial video is available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aRqpqFOiS4&t=63s). Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Modeling the TrueBeam linac using a CAD to Geant4 geometry implementation: Dose and IAEA-compliant phase space calculations

Purpose: To create an accurate 6 MV Monte Carlo simulation phase space for the Varian TrueBeam treatment head geometry imported from cad (computer aided design) without adjusting the input electron phase space parameters. Methods: geant4 v4.9.2.p01 was employed to simulate the 6 MV beam treatment head geometry of the Varian TrueBeam linac. The electron tracks in the linear accelerator were simulated with Parmela, and the obtained electron phase space was used as an input to the Monte Carlo beam transport and dose calculations. The geometry components are tessellated solids included in geant4 as gdml (generalized dynamic markup language) files obtained via STEP (standard for the exchange of product) export from Pro/Engineering, followed by STEP import in Fastrad, a STEP-gdml converter. The linac has a compact treatment head and the small space between the shielding collimator and the divergent arc of the upper jaws forbids the implementation of a plane for storing the phase space. Instead, an IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) compliant phase space writer was implemented on a cylindrical surface. The simulation was run in parallel on a 1200 node Linux cluster. The 6 MV dose calculations were performed for field sizes varying from 4 x 4 to 40 x 40 cm{sup 2}. The voxel size for the 60x60x40 cm{sup 3} water phantom was 4x4x4 mm{sup 3}. For the 10x10 cm{sup 2} field, surface buildup calculations were performed using 4x4x2 mm{sup 3} voxels within 20 mm of the surface. Results: For the depth dose curves, 98% of the calculated data points agree within 2% with the experimental measurements for depths between 2 and 40 cm. For depths between 5 and 30 cm, agreement within 1% is obtained for 99% (4x4), 95% (10x10), 94% (20x20 and 30x30), and 89% (40x40) of the data points, respectively. In the buildup region, the agreement is within 2%, except at 1 mm depth where the deviation is 5% for the 10x10 cm{sup 2} open field. For the lateral dose profiles, within the field size for fields up to 30x30 cm{sup 2}, the agreement is within 2% for depths up to 10 cm. At 20 cm depth, the in-field maximum dose difference for the 30x30 cm{sup 2} open field is within 4%, while the smaller field sizes agree within 2%. Outside the field size, agreement within 1% of the maximum dose difference is obtained for all fields. The calculated output factors varied from 0.938{+-}0.015 for the 4x4 cm{sup 2} field to 1.088{+-}0.024 for the 40x40 cm{sup 2} field. Their agreement with the experimental output factors is within 1%. Conclusions: The authors have validated a geant4 simulated IAEA-compliant phase space of the TrueBeam linac for the 6 MV beam obtained using a high accuracy geometry implementation from cad. These files are publicly available and can be used for further research.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Towards Superior Software Portability with SHAD and HPX C++ Libraries

As hardware architectures and software stacks complexity grows, development productivity, performance and software portability, quickly evolve from desirable features to actual needs. SHAD, the Scalable High-performance Algorithms and Data-structures C++ library is designed to mitigate these issues: it provides general purpose building blocks as well as high-level custom utilities, and offers a shared-memory programming abstraction which facilitates the programming of complex systems, scaling up to High Performance Computing clusters. SHAD’s portability is achieved through an abstract runtime interface, which decouples the upper layers of the library and hides the low level details of the underlying architecture. This layer enables SHAD to interface with different runtime/threading systems, e.g. Intel TBB and Global Memory and Threading (GMT). However, current backends targeting distributed systems, rely on a centralized controller which may possibly limit scalability up to hundreds of nodes and creates a network hot spot due to all to one communication for synchronization, and possibly resulting in degraded performance at high process counts. In this research, we explore HPX, the C++ standard library for parallelism and concurrency, as an additional backend in support of the SHAD library, and present the methodologies in support of local and remote task executions in SHAD with respect to HPX. Finally, we evaluate the proposed system by comparing against existing backends of SHAD and analyzing their performance on C++ Standard Template Library algorithms.

Wu, Nanmiao↗

FitCache: A Transparent Drop-In Framework for Multi-Tier Caching to Accelerate Distributed Deep Learning Workloads

Training in Deep learning (DL) remains highly compute- and data-intensive, with I/O becoming a critical bottleneck as models and datasets scale. Recent studies report that data loading can dominate training time, especially on large-scale HPC systems with shared parallel file systems (PFS). Existing caching approaches either rely on single-tier designs or require intrusive modifications to training pipelines, limiting their portability and effectiveness. In this work, we present FitCache, a transparent drop-in framework for multi-tier caching to accelerate distributed DL training by coordinating fast local memory (e.g., DRAM, Persistent Memory (PMem)) and NVMe as hierarchical caches atop PFS. Our design adapts to hardware diversity, i.e., if NVMe is missing, memory transparently acts as a caching tier, ensuring stable performance. FitCache transparently intercepts I/O requests and issues concurrent fetches across all tiers, returning data from the fastest responder without centralized metadata or static redirection paths. FitCache adapts to dynamic workloads and heterogeneous clusters while maintaining POSIX compatibility. Experiments on Frontier (2048 GPUs) and smaller research clusters show that FitCache reduces training time by up to 40% and per-batch I/O latency by up to 71.6% compared to Lustre Orion PFS, offering a drop-in solution for scalable DL training.

Hu, Guangxing [ORNL] (ORCID:0009000283203614)↗

Evaluation of a pair-based, joint-likelihood association approach for regional infrasound event identification

SUMMARY A Bayesian framework for the association of infrasonic detections is presented and evaluated for analysis at regional propagation scales. A pair-based, joint-likelihood association approach is developed that identifies events by computing the probability that individual detection pairs are attributable to a hypothetical common source and applying hierarchical clustering to identify events from the pair-based analysis. The framework is based on a Bayesian formulation introduced for infrasonic source localization and utilizes the propagation models developed for that application with modifications to improve the numerical efficiency of the analysis. Clustering analysis is completed using hierarchical analysis via weighted linkage for a non-Euclidean distance matrix defined by the negative log-joint-likelihood values. The method is evaluated using regional synthetic data with propagation distances of hundreds of kilometres in order to study the sensitivity of the method to uncertainties and errors in backazimuth and time of arrival. The method is found to be robust and stable for typical uncertainties, able to effectively distinguish noise detections within the data set from those in events, and can be made numerically efficient due to its ease of parallelization.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Knowledge Discovery for Smart Grid Operation, Control, and Situation Awareness -- A Big Data Visualization Platform

In this paper, a big data visualization platform is designed to discover the hidden useful knowledge for smart grid (SG) operation, control and situation awareness. The spawn of smart sensors at both grid side and customer side can provide large volume of heterogeneous data that collect information in all time spectrums. Extracting useful knowledge from this big-data poll is still challenging. In this paper, the Apache Spark, an open source cluster computing framework, is used to process the big-data to effectively discover the hidden knowledge. A high-speed communication architecture utilizing the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model is designed to transmit the data to a visualization platform. This visualization platform uses Google Earth, a global geographic information system (GIS) to link the geological information with the SG knowledge and visualize the information in user defined fashion. The University of Denver's campus grid is used as a SG test bench and several demonstrations are presented for the proposed platform.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Productive Programming of Distributed Systems with the SHAD C++ Library

High-performance computing (HPC) is often perceived as a matter of making large-scale systems (e.g., clusters) run as fast as possible, regardless the required programming effort. However, the idea of "bringing HPC to the masses" has recently emerged. Inspired by this vision, we have designed SHAD, the Scalable High-performance Algorithms and Data-structures library. SHAD is open source software, written in C++, for C++ developers. Unlike other HPC libraries for distributed systems, which rely on SPMD models, SHAD adopts a shared-memory programming abstraction, to make C++ programmers feel at home. Underneath, SHAD manages tasking and data-movements, moving the computation where data resides and taking advantage of asynchrony to tolerate network latency. At the bottom of his stack, SHAD can interface with multiple runtime systems: this not only improves developer’s productivity, by hiding the complexity of such software and of the underlying hardware, but also greatly enhance code portability. Thanks to its abstraction layers, SHAD can indeed target different systems, ranging from laptops to HPC clusters, without any need for modifying the user-level code. We have prototyped and open-sourced the implementation of (a subset of) the C++ standard library (STL) targeting multi-node HPC clusters. Our work allows plain STL-based C++ code to scale on HPC systems, with no need for rewriting the code to exploit the complex hardware. SHAD is available under Apache v2 License at https://github.com/pnnl/SHAD. In this paper we overview the design of the SHAD library, depicting its main components: runtime systems abstractions for tasking; parallel and distributed data-structures; STL-compliant interfaces and algorithms.

Castellana, Vito G.↗

PLATO (Parallel Load Assignment Tool): A Parallel Workload Partitioner for Particle-based Methods

A key first step in many large-scale high-performance scientific computing applications is the distribution of the computational domain across all participating processors of a parallel computing platform such as a shared memory machine, cluster or a tightly-coupled supercomputer. The primary goal of such a partitioning step is to ensure that the computational work performed by each process remains load-balanced throughout the execution of the parallel application. In this project, a general-purpose parallel partitioning tool, code-named PLATO, was designed and implemented. PLATO assumes that the workload is a set of points in an n-dimensional metric space. These points are abstractions of computational units that may represent point-like computational units such as celestial objects in astrophysics, atoms in materials sciences and molecules in biology/chemistry, or may represent more abstract computational units such as grid points in finite difference methods, grid elements in finite element methods or n-dimensional points in the feature space of a host of other applications. PLATO supports several key and useful capabilities, namely: (a) multiple load partitioning strategies, (b) support for arbitrary user-defined processor topology, (c) pre-fetching data from neighboring processors based on user-defined parameters, and (d) support for arbitrary number and types of attributes associated with each point in the computational domain. PLATO is implemented in the C programming language using Message Passing Interface (MPI) for inter-processor communications and its parallel performance tested on up to 48 processors of a shared memory machine. This report includes a detailed performance study of PLATO using parallel speedup and iso-efficiency as the two main metrics of parallel performance. In addition, a user manual and DOXYGEN generated code documentation have been included for completeness.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Distributed out-of-memory NMF on CPU/GPU architectures

We propose an efficient distributed out-of-memory implementation of the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm for heterogeneous high-performance-computing systems. The proposed implementation is based on prior work on NMFk, which can perform automatic model selection and extract latent variables and patterns from data. In this work, we extend NMFk by adding support for dense and sparse matrix operation on multi-node, multi-GPU systems. The resulting algorithm is optimized for out-of-memory problems where the memory required to factorize a given matrix is greater than the available GPU memory. Memory complexity is reduced by batching/tiling strategies, and sparse and dense matrix operations are significantly accelerated with GPU cores (or tensor cores when available). Input/output latency associated with batch copies between host and device is hidden using CUDA streams to overlap data transfers and compute asynchronously, and latency associated with collective communications (both intra-node and inter-node) is reduced using optimized NVIDIA Collective Communication Library (NCCL) based communicators. Benchmark results show significant improvement, from 32X to 76x speedup, with the new implementation using GPUs over the CPU-based NMFk. Good weak scaling was demonstrated on up to 4096 multi-GPU cluster nodes with approximately 25,000 GPUs when decomposing a dense 340 Terabyte-size matrix and an 11 Exabyte-size sparse matrix of density 10 -6 .

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Porting fragmentation methods to GPUs using an OpenMP API: Offloading the resolution-of-the-identity second-order Møller–Plesset perturbation method

Here, using an OpenMP Application Programming Interface, the resolution-of-the-identity second-order Møller–Plesset perturbation (RI-MP2) method has been off-loaded onto graphical processing units (GPUs), both as a standalone method in the GAMESS electronic structure program and as an electron correlation energy component in the effective fragment molecular orbital (EFMO) framework. First, a new scheme has been proposed to maximize data digestion on GPUs that subsequently linearizes data transfer from central processing units (CPUs) to GPUs. Second, the GAMESS Fortran code has been interfaced with GPU numerical libraries (e.g., NVIDIA cuBLAS and cuSOLVER) for efficient matrix operations (e.g., matrix multiplication, matrix decomposition, and matrix inversion). The standalone GPU RI-MP2 code shows an increasing speedup of up to 7.5× using one NVIDIA V100 GPU with one IBM 42-core P9 CPU for calculations on fullerenes of increasing size from 40 to 260 carbon atoms using the 6-31G(d)/cc-pVDZ-RI basis sets. A single Summit node with six V100s can compute the RI-MP2 correlation energy of a cluster of 175 water molecules using the correlation consistent basis sets cc-pVDZ/cc-pVDZ-RI containing 4375 atomic orbitals and 14 700 auxiliary basis functions in ~0.85 h. In the EFMO framework, the GPU RI-MP2 component shows near linear scaling for a large number of V100s when computing the energy of an 1800-atom mesoporous silica nanoparticle in a bath of 4000 water molecules. The parallel efficiencies of the GPU RI-MP2 component with 2304 and 4608 V100s are 98.0% and 96.1%, respectively.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Reducing Communication in Graph Neural Network Training

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful and flexible neural networks that use the naturally sparse connectivity information of the data. GNNs represent this connectivity as sparse matrices, which have lower arithmetic intensity and thus higher communication costs compared to dense matrices, making GNNs harder to scale to high concurrencies than convolutional or fully-connected neural networks. Here, we introduce a family of parallel algorithms for training GNNs and show that they can asymptotically reduce communication compared to previous parallel GNN training methods. We implement these algorithms, which are based on 1D, 1. 5D, 2D, and 3D sparse-dense matrix multiplication, using torch.distributed on GPU-equipped clusters. Our algorithms optimize communication across the full GNN training pipeline. We train GNNs on over a hundred GPUs on multiple datasets, including a protein network with over a billion edges.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Comparison of Distributive Consensus Algorithms for AnomalyDetection on the Power-Grid

As an increasing number of devices in the power-grid rely on high-precision clocks to measure electrical properties and time stamp data, GPS receivers have become a vulnerability on the power-grid. GPS spoofing attacks, in which a fake signal is transmitted, can cause sensor measurement errors that can misinform protective equipment and grid operators for both the transmission and distribution grid. The technology being developed to secure precision clocks in the transmission grid are not appropriate for the distribution grid. Thus, there is a need to developed anomaly detection algorithms that are suitable for the hardware available on the distribution grid. Traditionally, a distributed detection framework is comprised of spatially distributed nodes which acquire observations about a quantity of interest and sends the data to the fusion center, where a global decision is made. Instead the distribution grid has low-power devices, such as smart inverters and microPMUs, that could be used to perform highly parallelized calculations. Having on node calculations is beneficial since it is more network and computation efficient, as the more calculations can be performed where the data is being captured instead of communicating across a slow network to a centralized fusion center. Instead, we could employ an alternate peer-to-peer type of information exchange on the distribution grid that can still reach a global decision. A decentralized approach to anomaly detection makes efficient use of the computational and network bandwidth that exists, and it also lacks the single point of failure of a centralized approach. Thus, a decentralized local information exchange and/or inference is preferred. Lastly, the unreliability of the distribution grid network connections and potential noise or error in the measurements must be considered. In order to produce an effective detection tool, a Byzantine-fault tolerant and asynchronous algorithm must be developed. Thus, the first phase of our project is to develop a distributed, decentralized, asynchronous, Byzantine-fault tolerant, collaborative autonomy-based anomaly detection algorithm to collectively analyze clusters of data for signs of a malicious attack.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Massively Parallel Implementation of the CCSD(T) Method Using the Resolution-of-the-Identity Approximation and a Hybrid Distributed/Shared Memory Parallelization Model

In this work, a parallel algorithm is described for the coupled-cluster singles and doubles method augmented with a perturbative correction for triple excitations [CCSD(T)] using the resolution-of-the-identity (RI) approximation for two-electron repulsion integrals (ERIs). The algorithm bypasses the storage of four-center ERIs by adopting an integral-direct strategy. The CCSD amplitude equations are given in a compact quasi-linear form by factorizing them in terms of amplitude-dressed three-center intermediates. A hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallelization scheme is employed, which uses the OpenMP-based shared memory model for intranode parallelization and the MPI-based distributed memory model for internode parallelization. Parallel efficiency has been optimized for all terms in the CCSD amplitude equations. Two different algorithms have been implemented for the rate-limiting terms in the CCSD amplitude equations that entail and -scaling computational costs, where N O and N V denote the number of correlated occupied and virtual orbitals, respectively. One of the algorithms assembles the four-center ERIs requiring N V 4 and N O 2 N V 2 -scaling memory costs in a distributed manner on a number of MPI ranks, while the other algorithm completely bypasses the assembling of quartic memory-scaling ERIs and thus largely reduces the memory demand. It is demonstrated that the former memory-expensive algorithm is faster on a few hundred cores, while the latter memory-economic algorithm shows a better strong scaling in the limit of a few thousand cores. The program is shown to exhibit a near-linear scaling, in particular for the compute-intensive triples correction step, on up to 8000 cores. The performance of the program is demonstrated via calculations involving molecules with 24–51 atoms and up to 1624 atomic basis functions. As the first application, the complete basis set (CBS) limit for the interaction energy of the π-stacked uracil dimer from the S66 data set has been investigated. This work reports the first calculation of the interaction energy at the CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVQZ level without local orbital approximation. The CBS limit for the CCSD correlation contribution to the interaction energy was found to be -8.01 kcal/mol, which agrees very well with the value -7.99 kcal/mol reported by Schmitz, Hättig, and Tew [ Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2014 , 16 , 22167-22178]. The CBS limit for the total interaction energy was estimated to be -9.64 kcal/mol.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Memory Optimization for Phase-field Simulations

Phase-field simulations are computationally and memory intensive applications. Many of the phase-field simulations being conducted in support of NEAMS were not capable of running on “normal clusters” with 2-4GB of RAM per core, and instead required specialized “big-memory” clusters with 64GB per core. To address this issue, the MOOSE team developed a new Python-based utility called MemoryLogger, and applied it to locate, diagnose, and eradicate memory bottlenecks within the MOOSE framework. MemoryLogger allows for a better understanding of the memory usage of an application being run in parallel across a cluster. Memory usage information is captured for every individual process in a parallel job, and communicated to the head node of the cluster. Console text output from the application itself is automatically matched with this memory usage information to produce a detailed picture of memory usage over time, making it straightforward to identify the subroutines which contribute most to the application’s peak memory usage. The information produced by the MemoryLogger quickly and effectively narrows the search for memory optimizations to the most data-intensive parts of the simulation.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

ABWR start-up test analysis using BWR core simulator with three-dimensional direct response matrix method

The ABWR start-up test analysis has been done with the BWR core simulator using the three--dimensional direct response matrix (3D-DRM) method. The Monte Carlo code VMONT made the sub-response matrices for the 3D-DRM method. Each boundary surface was subdivided by 4 x 4 for transverse segments, by 4 for angular segments and by 4 for axial zones in a node. For the calculation speedup, the 3D-DRM code used the divided sub-response matrices data set. The code used the MPI and OpenMP for the parallelized method. The median value is set as the average critical eigenvalues. The changes from the maximum value to the minimum value are 0.34 %{Delta}k with the spectral history method and 0.40 %{Delta}k without it, and the respective standard deviations were 0.12 % and 0.14 %. Using the spectral history method decreased the variation by 0.06 %{Delta}k. The root mean square differences of the axial power distribution were about 6 % between the analysis results and the plant data. Using the currents which converged in the previous exposure step reduced the number of iterations when the CR pattern changed only slightly. The averaged calculation time for each exposure step was about 5 hours on 12 PC Linux cluster servers with Core 2 Quad 3 GHz. (authors)

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

ArborX 2.0

ArborX library tackles a problem of efficiently finding geometric objects that are close in space. Variations of this problem, such as finding the nearest neighbors of a point, or finding all objects within a certain distance, are inherent components of applications in many fields. The data may be large so that solving the problem efficiently may require significant computational resources, such as multiple processors or accelerators such as general purpose GPUs. ArborX' main advantage in its ability to solve large problems efficiently utilizing a combination of distributed and on-node parallelism. ArborX can be run efficiently on a wide variety of hardware, including GPUs from different vendors, which distinguishes it from other available libraries which typically choose only few of these. The other advantage is that it supports both types of user problems: spatial problems (useful for intersections and finding objects within certain distance), and nearest neighbor problems. ArborX also supports flexible interface in its interaction with a user. Particularly, it allows a user to call user's own function on a positive match, a functionality not rarely available in other libraries. ArborX implements construction and traversal algorithms using efficient tree structures, such as bounding volume hierarchy (BVH). At its core, ArborX uses linear BVH for its low construction cost and sufficient quality. ArborX implements both spatial and nearest-neighbor traversal algorithms. ArborX also provides several clustering algorithms (minimum spanning tree, DBSCAN, HDBSCAN*), interpolation using minimum least squares and ray tracing. ArborX is written using C++, and is parallelized using the message passing interface (MPI) for the distributed communication, and the Kokkos library for on-node parallelism. This approach allows ArborX to be run on a wide variety of hardware, from common laptops and desktops to supercomputers while using the same codebase.

Prokopenko, Andrey [Oak Ridge National Laboratory ↗

Fluorescence Color by Data-Driven Design of Genomic Silver Clusters

DNA nucleobase sequence controls the size of DNA-stabilized silver clusters, leading to their well-known yet little understood sequence-tuned colors. The enormous space of possible DNA sequences for templating clusters has challenged the understanding of how sequence selects cluster properties and has limited the design of applications that employ these clusters. Here, we investigate the genomic role of DNA sequence for fluorescent silver clusters using a data-driven approach. Employing rapid parallel silver cluster synthesis and fluorimetry, we determine the fluorescence spectra of silver cluster products stabilized by 1432 distinct DNA oligomers. By applying pattern recognition algorithms to this large experimental data set, we discover certain DNA base patterns, or “motifs,” that correlate to silver clusters with similar fluorescence spectra. These motifs are employed in machine learning classifiers to predictively design DNA template sequences for specific fluorescence color bands. Our method improves selectivity of templates by 330% for silver clusters with peak emission wavelengths beyond 660 nm. The discovered base motifs also provide physical insights into how DNA sequence controls silver cluster size and color. Finally, this predictive design approach for color of DNA-stabilized silver clusters exhibits the potential of machine learning and data mining to increase the precision and efficiency of nanomaterials design, even for a soft-matter-inorganic hybrid system characterized by an extremely large parameter space.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

iez: Resource Contention Aware Load Balancing for Large-Scale Parallel File Systems

Parallel I/O performance is crucial to sustaining scientific applications on large-scale High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. However, I/O load imbalance in the underlying distributed and shared storage systems can significantly reduce overall application performance. There are two conflicting challenges to mitigate this load imbalance: (i) optimizing systemwide data placement to maximize the bandwidth advantages of distributed storage servers, i.e., allocating I/O resources efficiently across applications and job runs; and (ii) optimizing client-centric data movement to minimize I/O load request latency between clients and servers, i.e., allocating I/O resources efficiently in service to a single application and job run. Moreover, existing approaches that require application changes limit wide-spread adoption in commercial or proprietary deployments. We propose iez, an “end-to-end control plane” where clients transparently and adaptively write to a set of selected I/O servers to achieve balanced data placement. Our control plane leverages realtime load information for distributed storage server global data placement while our design model leverages trace-based optimization techniques to minimize I/O load request latency between clients and servers. We evaluate our proposed system on an experimental cluster for two common use cases: synthetic I/O benchmark IOR for large sequential writes and a scientific application I/O kernel, HACC-I/O. Results show read and write performance improvements of up to 34% and 32%, respectively, compared to the state of the art.

Wadhwa, Bharti↗