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At least 253 records · Page 14
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2017

Big Data Meets HPC Log Analytics: Scalable Approach to Understanding Systems at Extreme Scale

Today's high-performance computing (HPC) systems are heavily instrumented, generating logs containing information about abnormal events, such as critical conditions, faults, errors and failures, system resource utilization, and about the resource usage of user applications. These logs, once fully analyzed and correlated, can produce detailed information about the system health, root causes of failures, and analyze an application's interactions with the system, providing valuable insights to domain scientists and system administrators. However, processing HPC logs requires a deep understanding of hardware and software components at multiple layers of the system stack. Moreover, most log data is unstructured and voluminous, making it more difficult for system users and administrators to manually inspect the data. With rapid increases in the scale and complexity of HPC systems, log data processing is becoming a big data challenge. This paper introduces a HPC log data analytics framework that is based on a distributed NoSQL database technology, which provides scalability and high availability, and the Apache Spark framework for rapid in-memory processing of the log data. The analytics framework enables the extraction of a range of information about the system so that system administrators and end users alike can obtain necessary insights for their specific needs. We describe our experience with using this framework to glean insights from the log data about system behavior from the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Park, Byung↗
DOE OSTI2018

Hardware Evaluation: Abstract Machine Models and Proxy Architectures for Exascale Computing

The strategic and economic impacts of high performance computing (HPC) systems, over the last several decades, have enabled dramatic improvements in manufacturing, design, development, and research, across almost every sector of the U.S. economy, including genetic analysis for agriculture and medicine, oil exploration, electronics, aircraft, and automotive design, and of course national defense technologies. HPC has repeatedly compounded reductions in time-to-solution and time-to-market in each of these areas. In recognition of these strategic and economic impacts, the Department of Energy (DOE) created the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) as a broad-based technology project focusing on simultaneously co-evolving high-performance computing architecture, system software, and application software. While many details of the exascale architectures are undefined, communicating the form and direction of this co-evolution of advances, in each of these three components, across the project, presents a need for a common language through which these advances can be shared. In this document we present a series of abstract representations designed to allow application developers to focus on the aspects of the machine that are important or relevant to performance and code structure. These abstract machine models (AMMs) describe the proposed architectures at the component and system level and are intended as communication aids between application developers and hardware architects during the co-design process. In addition to providing a common language for communication, the constraints of protecting the intellectual property of ECP’s vendor partners requires that the architectural advances be presented in an abstract sense, rather than exposing the specifics of an individual vendor’s designs, while still providing enough detail such that application developers will be able to reason about the performance trade-offs in the design space of their applications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2018

User-level File Systems Specialized for HPC Workloads Year-End Report

High-performance computing (HPC) clusters attract the attention of Deep Learning (DL) training users due to the clusters' powerful computation capabilities. While there have been many existing efforts to enable deep neural works to leverage the powerful CPU and GPU processors from leadership high-performance computing (HPC) systems, large-scale deep learning with larger datasets requires efficient I/O support from the underlying file and storage systems. As some current and upcoming HPC clusters have large on-node memory or are equipped with NVMe SSD on compute nodes, more distributed DL trainings are considered to leverage those storages to store dataset for efficient dataset access. Our project goal is to design a specialized DL-oriented file system to improve datasets loading performance of any DL training applications. Over the past year, the team at Florida State University has performed research activities in three different aspects, including 1) completing a specialized memory-based I/O framework (DeepIO) for improving dataset loading performance on DL applications; 2) proposing a more generalized file system (DLFS) for DL applications on node-local SSDs; 3) completing the BeeGFS performance evaluation project for Deep Neural Networks.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2020

Estimating Lossy Compressibility of Scientific Data Using Deep Neural Networks

Simulation based scientific applications generate increasingly large amounts of data on high-performance computing (HPC) systems. To allow data to be stored and analyzed efficiently, data compression is often utilized to reduce the volume and velocity of data. However, a question often raised by domain scientists is the level of compression that can be expected so that they can make more informed decisions, balancing between accuracy and performance. In this letter, we propose a deep neural network based approach for estimating the compressibility of scientific data. To train the neural network, we build both general features as well as compressor-specific features so that the characteristics of both data and lossy compressors are captured in training. Our approach is demonstrated to outperform a prior analytical model as well as a sampling based approach in the case of a biased estimation, i.e., for SZ. However, for the unbiased estimation (i.e., ZFP), the sampling based approach yields the best accuracy, despite the high overhead involved in sampling the target dataset.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Scaling the memory wall using mixed-precision - HPG-MxP on an exascale-class machine

Mixed-precision algorithms have been proposed as a way for scientific computing to benefit from some of the gains seen for AI on recent high performance computing (HPC) platforms. A few applications dominated by dense matrix operations have seen substantial speedups by utilizing low precision formats such as FP16. However, a majority of scientific simulation applications are memory bandwidth limited. Beyond preliminary studies, the practical gain from using mixed-precision algorithms on a given high-performance computing (HPC) system is largely unclear. The High Performance GMRES Mixed Precision (HPG-MxP) benchmark has been proposed to measure the useful performance of a HPC system on sparse matrix-based mixed-precision applications. In this work, we present an implementation of the HPG-MxP benchmark for an exascale system and describe our algorithm enhancements. We show for the first time a speedup of 1.6x using a combination of double- and single-precision keeping the same residual level on modern GPU-based supercomputers.

Kashi, Aditya [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000325893792)↗
DOE OSTI2022

Long Term Per-Component Power and Thermal Measurements of the OLCF Summit System

As we move into the exascale era, the power and energy footprints of high-performance computing (HPC) systems have grown significantly larger. Due to the harsh power and thermal conditions the system, components are exposed to extreme operating conditions. Operation of such modern HPC systems requires deep insights into long term system behavior to maintain its efficiency as well as its longevity. To help the HPC community to gain such insights, we provide a dataset that records the long-term power and thermal behavior of the 200PF pre-exascale supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), Summit. This system is an IBM AC922 based system that has 9,252 IBM Power9 CPUs and 27,756 Nvidia V100 GPUs and can consume up to 13MW power at peak. Heat removal is performed using medium temperature direct liquid cooling and rear-door heat exchanger based secondary cooling loop. Originally extracted from a high-resolution (1Hz) per-component (GPUs, CPUs) measurements from the system, we primarily provide a dataset that has 10-second and 1-minute mean power and thermal measurements selected from five month-long segments over the course of 2020 (January and August), 2021 (February and August), and 2022 (January). For convenience, we also provide various sub datasets randomly sampled from the time and space (hosts) of the cluster. Further details and example code for analysis can be found in the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/at-aaims/summit_power_and_thermal_data

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Sandia’s Liquid-Cooled Data Center Boosts Efficiency and Resiliency

The Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) encourages federal agencies and organizations to improve data center energy efficiency, which can offer tremendous opportunities for energy and cost savings. In this success story, a novel liquid cooling system provides reliable, resilient, and energy-efficient cooling for high performance computing (HPC) systems at Sandia National Laboratories.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2017

High-Performance Key-Value Store on OpenSHMEM

Recently, there has been a growing interest in enabling fast data analytics by leveraging system capabilities from large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) systems. OpenSHMEM is a popular run-time system on HPC systems that has been used for large-scale compute-intensive scientific applications. In this paper, we propose to leverage OpenSHMEM to design a distributed in-memory key-value store for fast data analytics. Accordingly, we have developed SHMEMCache on top of OpenSHMEM to leverage its symmetric global memory, efficient one-sided communication operations and general portability. We have also evaluated SHMEMCache through extensive experimental studies. Our results show that SHMEMCache has accomplished significant performance improvements over hte original Memcached in terms of latency and throughput. Our evaluation on the Titan supercomputer has also demonstrated that SHMEMCache can scale to 1024 nodes.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Characterizing Machine Learning I/O Workloads on Leadership Scale HPC Systems

High performance computing (HPC) is no longer solely limited to traditional workloads such as simulation and modeling. With the increase in the popularity of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) technologies, we are observing that an increasing number of HPC users are incorporating ML methods into their workflow and scientific discovery processes, across a wide spectrum of science domains such as biology, earth science, and physics. This gives rise to a diverse set of I/O patterns than the traditional checkpoint/restart-based HPC I/O behavior. The details of the I/O characteristics of such ML I/O workloads have not been studied extensively for large-scale leadership HPC systems. This paper aims to fill that gap by providing an in-depth analysis to gain an understanding of the I/O behavior of ML I/O workloads using darshan - an I/O characterization tool designed for lightweight tracing and profiling. We study the darshan logs of more than 23, 000 HPC ML I/O jobs over a time period of one year running on Summit - the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. This paper provides a systematic I/O characterization of ML I/O jobs running on a leadership scale supercomputer to understand how the I/O behavior differs across science domains and the scale of workloads, and analyze the usage of parallel file system and burst buffer by ML I/O workloads.

Paul, Arnab↗
DOE OSTI2019

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↗
DOE OSTI2025

Benchmark Tracking System for Performance Monitoring

Benchmarking is essential for high-performance software development, particularly for monitoring performance across code iterations. This project focused on enhancing the benchmarking process for Lamellar, an asynchronous runtime for High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Prior to this work, benchmark results were difficult to track and compare across code versions, presenting significant challenges in identifying performance regressions and long-term trends. The primary objective was to establish a systematic, reproducible approach for measuring performance and detecting regressions following code commits. Our methodology involved three key components: standardizing benchmark outputs, implementing data versioning, and developing analysis tools. We standardized the benchmark output format to JSON Line records containing specific fields (execution time, hardware specifications, and environmental variables). To address data management challenges, we evaluated several options and eventually chose a git repository dedicated to benchmark data. We developed a suite of Python tools that processed benchmark results, enriched them with metadata, and facilitated search in the repository. The resulting system enables more efficient filtering and comparison of performance metrics across commit histories, hardware configurations, and benchmark variants through a unified query interface. Our implementation reduces computational overhead by first checking for existing results through configuration matching before initiating new benchmark runs, thereby conserving resources. The system has been validated by Lamellar developers. It organizes results by benchmark type and build configurations for efficient retrieval. Future developments include a planned Large Language Model interface for predicting benchmark performance, incorporating the criterion package for statistical analysis, which will enable automated detection of statistically significant performance changes, and integration with continuous integration pipelines. Despite these enhancements being reserved for future work, this project has successfully provided the Lamellar development team with a framework for maintaining consistent performance standards and identifying optimization opportunities across workloads and hardware environments.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2019

Implementing efficient data compression and encryption in a persistent key-value store for HPC

Recently, persistent data structures, like key-value stores (KVSs), which are stored in a high-performance computing (HPC) system’s nonvolatile memory, provide an attractive solution for a number of emerging challenges like limited I/O performance. Data compression and encryption are two well-known techniques for improving several properties of such data-oriented systems. This article investigates how to efficiently integrate data compression and encryption into persistent KVSs for HPC with the ultimate goal of hiding their costs and complexity in terms of performance and ease of use. Our compression technique exploits deep memory hierarchy in an HPC system to achieve both storage reduction and performance improvement. Our encryption technique provides a practical level of security and enables sharing of sensitive data securely in complex scientific workflows with nearly imperceptible cost. We implement the proposed techniques on top of a distributed embedded KVS to evaluate the benefits and costs of incorporating these capabilities along different points in the dataflow path, illustrating differences in effective bandwidth, latency, and additional computational expense on Swiss National Supercomputing Centre’s Grand Tavé and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s Cori.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2026

Energy–Performance Trade-offs in Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning on SmartNIC-Enabled HPC Systems

Federated learning (FL) is increasingly deployed on accelerator-rich high-performance computing (HPC) systems, yet the system-level energy cost of privacy-aware FL remains poorly understood, particularly across heterogeneous networking and server-placement options. We present a measurement-driven study of energy–performance trade-offs for FL on GH200-class nodes across three deployment configurations: CPU-Ethernet, CPU-InfiniBand (RDMA-capable), and a DPU-hosted FL server over InfiniBand using a BlueField-3 SmartNIC/DPU. Using NVIDIA FLARE (NVFLARE), we align node-level power telemetry with per-round timing extracted from NVFLARE logs to quantify time-to-solution (TTS), energy-to-solution (ETS), energy-delay product (EDP), and synchronization behavior for three transformer models (ALBERT, DistilBERT, BERT), trained with and without differential privacy (DP). We find that interconnect choice is the dominant driver of runtime and energy: host-managed InfiniBand consistently reduces communication overhead versus Ethernet, yielding lower TTS/ETS/EDP. In contrast, in our NVFLARE deployment, placing the FL server on the DPU does not consistently match CPU-InfiniBand performance and can be slower—especially for larger models—highlighting that server placement alone is not sufficient to guarantee end-to-end gains. Finally, under our fixed-round protocol, DP increases per-round cost and runtime variance; ETS increases largely in proportion to TTS because average node power remains relatively stable across configurations.

Kotevska, Olivera [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000316772243)↗
DOE OSTI2016

Dynamic Resource Management for Parallel Tasks in an Oversubscribed Energy-Constrained Heterogeneous Environment

Abstract: The worth of completing parallel tasks is modeled using utility functions, which monotonically-decrease with time and represent the importance and urgency of a task. These functions define the utility earned by a task at the time of its completion. The performance of such a system is measured as the total utility earned by all completed tasks over some interval of time (e.g., 24 hours). To maximize system performance when scheduling dynamically arriving parallel tasks onto a high performance computing (HPC) system that is oversubscribed and energy-constrained, we have designed, analyzed, and compared different heuristic techniques. Four utility-aware heuristics (i.e., Max Utility, Max Utility-per-Time, Max Utility-per-Resource, and Max Utility-per-Energy), three FCFS-based heuristics (Conservative Backfilling, EASY Backfilling, and FCFS with Multiple Queues), and a Random heuristic were examined in this study. A technique that is often used with the FCFS-based heuristics is the concept of a permanent reservation. We compare the performance of permanent reservations with temporary place-holders to demonstrate the advantages that place-holders can provide. We also present a novel energy filtering technique that constrains the maximum energy-per-resource used by each task. We conducted a simulation study to evaluate the performance of these heuristics and techniques in an energy-constrained oversubscribed HPC environment. With place-holders, energy filtering, and dropping tasks with low potential utility, our utility-aware heuristics are able to significantly outperform the existing FCFS-based techniques.

Energy-Constrained↗
DOE OSTI2019

Spack-Based Packaging and Development for HEP

The art event-based analysis framework is used by multiple Intensity Frontier and other experiments and projects in High Energy Physics (HEP). A system of tools and scripts based around a Fermilab-originated package management system called UNIX Product Support (UPS) has evolved to provide development, packaging, release management, and distribution of the art suite, related experimental software and external dependencies in relocatable binary form. The existing system has limitations in environments such as macOS with System Integrity Protection (SIP) enabled and the various High Performance Computing (HPC) systems that the field of HEP is increasingly looking to leverage. This has led to a search for other ways of providing experiments with a packaging and build system that meets their needs. We describe our efforts to develop a packaging and release management system based on the Spack HPC package management tool to replace the existing UPS-based system. We additionally describe a companion system: SpackDev and cetmodules, allowing simultaneous development of multiple HEP software packages in a consistent environment. A successful implementation of the intended system would have applicability across HEP rather than merely to the users of the art framework.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗