Predictive Execution of Workflows in a HPC+Cloud Environment
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Scientific workflows increasingly involve both HPC and machine-learning tasks, combining MPI-based simulations, training, and inference in a single execution. Launchers such as Slurm’s srun constrain concurrency and throughput, making them unsuitable for dynamic and heterogeneous workloads. We present a performance study of RADICAL-Pilot (RP) integrated with Flux and Dragon, two complementary runtime systems that enable hierarchical resource management and high-throughput function execution. Using synthetic and production-scale workloads on Frontier, we characterize the task execution properties of RP across runtime configurations. RP+Flux sustains up to 930 tasks/s, and RP+Flux+Dragon exceeds 1,500 tasks/s with over 99.6% utilization. In contrast, srun peaks at 152 tasks/s and degrades with scale, with utilization below 50%. For IMPECCABLE.v2 drug discovery campaign, RP+Flux reduces makespan by 30–60% relative to srun/Slurm and increases throughput more than four times on up to 1,024. These results demonstrate hybrid runtime integration in RP as a scalable approach for hybrid AI-HPC workloads.
The operation of large US Department of Energy (DOE) research facilities, like the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, results in the collection of complex multi-dimensional scientific datasets, both experimental and model-generated. In the future, it is envisioned that integrated data analysis coupled with large-scale high performance computing (HPC) simulations will be used to improve experimental planning and operation. Practically, massive data sets from these simulations provide the physics basis for generation of both reduced semi-analytic and machine-learning-based models. Storage of both HPC simulation datasets (generated from US DOE leadership computing facilities) and experimental datasets presents significant challenges. In this paper, we present a vision for a DOE-wide data management workflow that integrates US DOE fusion facilities with leadership computing facilities. Data persistence and long-term availability beyond the length of allocated projects is essential, particularly for verification and recalibration of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) models. Because these data sets are often generated and shared among hundreds of users across multiple leadership computing facility centers, they would benefit from cross-platform accessibility, persistent identifiers (e.g. DOI, or digital object identifier), and provenance tracking. Here, the ability to handle different data access patterns suggests that a combination of low cost, high latency (e.g. for storing ML training sets) and high cost, low latency systems (e.g. for real-time, integrated machine control feedback) may be needed.
ynchrotron light sources are routinely used to perform imaging experiments. In this paper, we review the relevant computational stages, identify bottlenecks, and highlight future opportunities to streamline data acquisition for experimental microscopy workflows. We demonstrate our preliminary exploration with an end-to-end scientific workflow on Summit based on micro-computed tomography data. Computational elements include: 1) reconstruction of volumetric image data; 2) denoising with deep neural networks; and 3) non-local means based segmentation and quantitative analysis.
Abstract not provided
Science gateways are altering the manner in which people interact with high performance computing (HPC) by providing a web browser based interface to advanced computing platforms. In particular, science gateways lower the barrier to using HPC by simplifying the process of submitting workloads to such systems and by offloading the efforts required to use HPC to the maintainers of the system. While science gateways decrease the time-to-science that comes with using such advanced systems, progress can still be made in improving the user's experience. In this paper we explore two strategies for integrating artificial intelligence tools commonly found in non-HPC service workflows: voice activated assistants and chatbots. Since August 2021, the HPC group at Idaho National Laboratory answers an average of 581 support tickets per month of which a large percentage could be addressed via these two strategies. This work defines the key capabilities that an HPC voice activated assistant and chatbot would need to address for a userbase consisting of largely non-expert users as well as a design for integration into the Open OnDemand science gateway.
Scientific workflows have become integral tools in broad scientific computing use cases. Science discovery is increasingly dependent on workflows to orchestrate large and complex scientific experiments that range from the execution of a cloud-based data preprocessing pipeline to multi-facility instrument-to-edge-to-HPC computational workflows. Given the changing landscape of scientific computing (often referred to as a computing continuum) and the evolving needs of emerging scientific applications, it is paramount that the development of novel scientific workflows and system functionalities seek to increase the efficiency, resilience, and pervasiveness of existing systems and applications. Specifically, the proliferation of machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) workflows, need for processing large-scale datasets produced by instruments at the edge, intensification of near real-time data processing, support for long-term experiment campaigns, and emergence of quantum computing as an adjunct to HPC, have significantly changed the functional and operational requirements of workflow systems. Workflow systems now need to, for example, support data streams from the edge-to-cloud-to-HPC, enable the management of many small-sized files, allow data reduction while ensuring high accuracy, orchestrate distributed services (workflows, instruments, data movement, provenance, publication, etc.) across computing and user facilities, among others. Further, to accelerate science, it is also necessary that these systems implement specifications/standards and APIs for seamless (horizontal and vertical) integration between systems and applications, as well as enable the publication of workflows and their associated products according to the FAIR principles.
Scope and objectives: BEE provides a portable, modular, HPC-focused workflow engine capable of managing containerized applications at scale. In FY21 BEE will expand its capabilities to provide more sophisticated handling of workflows. The ability to archive, clone, and re-run workflows will be added to BEE. The kinds of resources that BEE can use to execute workflow tasks will be expanded to include public and private clouds, such as Google Cloud Platform and OpenStack.
Scientific discovery increasingly requires executing heterogeneous scientific workflows on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. Heterogeneous workflows contain different types of tasks (e.g., simulation, analysis, and learning) that need to be mapped, scheduled, and launched on different computing. That requires a software stack that enables users to code their workflows and automate resource management and workflow execution. Currently, there are many workflow technologies with diverse levels of robustness and capabilities, and users face difficult choices of software that can effectively and efficiently support their use cases on HPC machines, especially when considering the latest exascale platforms. We contributed to addressing this issue by developing the ExaWorks Software Development Kit (SDK). The SDK is a curated collection of workflow technologies engineered following current best practices and specifically designed to work on HPC platforms. We present our experience with (1) curating those technologies, (2) integrating them to provide users with new capabilities, (3) developing a continuous integration platform to test the SDK on DOE HPC platforms, (4) designing a dashboard to publish the results of those tests, and (5) devising an innovative documentation platform to help users to use those technologies. Our experience details the requirements and the best practices needed to curate workflow technologies, and it also serves as a blueprint for the capabilities and services that DOE will have to offer to support a variety of scientific heterogeneous workflows on the newly available exascale HPC platforms.
The deployment of Science Gateways for High Performance Computing (HPC) systems can alter long-accepted usage patterns on supercomputing systems in positive ways as an ever-increasing number of users migrate their workflows to HPC systems. Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has deployed two separate advanced web platforms, Open OnDemand and NICE DCV, for integration with HPC resources to improve web accessibility for HPC users. Researchers conducted a multi-year study on how HPC usage pat- terns changed in the presence of these platforms. This work reports the results of that study and quantifies the observed impacts, including adoption by visualization and Jupyter Notebook/Lab users, decreased job submission friction, rapid uptake of HPC by Windows users, and increased overall system utilization. The most significant impacts were observed from the deployment of Open OnDemand, and this work also identifies some best practices for Open OnDemand deployment for HPC datacenters.
Scientific exploration generates expanding volumes of data that commonly require High Performance Computing (HPC) systems to facilitate research. HPC systems are complex ecosystems of hardware and software that frequently are not user friendly. The Usable Data Abstractions (UDA) project set out to build usable software for scientific workflows in HPC environments by undertaking multiple rounds of qualitative user research. Qualitative research investigates how individuals accomplish their work and our interview-based study surfaced a variety of insights about the experiences of working in and with HPC ecosystems. This report examines multiple facets to the experiences of scientists and developers using and supporting HPC systems. We discuss how stakeholders grasp the design and configuration of these systems, the impacts of abstraction layers on their ability to successfully do work, and the varied perceptions of time that shape this work. Examining the adoption of the Cori HPC at NERSC we explore the anticipations and lived experiences of users interacting with this system’s novel storage feature, the Burst Buffer. We present lessons learned from across these insights to illustrate just some of the challenges HPC facilities and their stakeholders need to account for when procuring and supporting these essential scientific resources to ensure their usability and utility to a variety of scientific practices.
We present the current status of a large-scale computing framework to address the need of the multidisciplinary effort to study chemical dynamics. Specifically, we are enabling scientists to process and store experimental data, run large-scale computationally expensive high-fidelity physical simulation, and analyze these results using the state-of-the-art data analytics tools, machine learning, and uncertainty quantification methods using heterogeneous computing resources, such as CPU and GPU cluster. The framework can integrate or abstract out multiple domains based on roles. In order to develop this framework, we have leveraged an existing framework coupled with in-house heterogeneous computing resources. We present the results of using this framework on a single metadata triggered workflow to accelerate an additive manufacturing use case.
This report, prepared by the NNSA/CEA Workflows Working Group, briefly summarizes the presentations in the areas of domain specific workflows, end user environments, data management, job and resource management, and infrastructure, and then identifies six broad areas for potential collaboration. A key finding is that users could benefit from greater interoperability, compatibility, and composability of the workflow technologies under development and that point-to-point collaboration opportunities should be identified to explore these aspects.
The Joint Laboratory for Extreme-Scale Computing (JLESC) focuses on software challenges in high-performance computing systems to meet the needs of today’s science campaigns, which often require large resources, consist of multiple tasks, and generate vast amounts of data. In this context, extreme-scale workflows have been the key factor in enabling scientific discoveries by helping scientists automate the dependencies and data exchanges between workflow tasks, instead of managing those manually. Here, in this paper, we present representative extreme-scale workflows and feature workflow systems developed by JLESC participating institutions. We present lessons learned while developing these tools, alongside with the open challenges and future research directions in the field of extreme-scale workflows.
BEE provides a portable, modular, HPC-focused workflow engine capable of managing containerized applications at scale.
BEE provides a portable, modular, HPC-focused workflow engine capable of managing containerized applications at scale. In FY22 BEE is completing enhancements and refinements that will complete the major development work of the workflow system. The first major milestone is the development of a graphical client. The second milestone will be the ability for BEE to automatically restart checkpointed tasks. The final milestone for FY22 will be the ability to launch and manage multiple simultaneous workflows.
Execution of heterogeneous workflows on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms present unprecedented resource management and execution coordination challenges for runtime systems. Task heterogeneity increases the complexity of resource and execution management, limiting the scalability and efficiency of workflow execution. Re-source partitioning and distribution of tasks execution over portioned re-sources promises to address those problems but we lack an experimental evaluation of its performance at scale. Here this paper provides a performance evaluation of the Process Management Interface for Exascale (PMIx) and its reference implementation PRRTE on the leadership-class HPC plat-form Summit, when integrated into a pilot-based runtime system called RADICAL-Pilot. We partition resources across multiple PRRTE Distributed Virtual Machine (DVM) environments, responsible for launching tasks via the PMIx interface. We experimentally measure the work-load execution performance in terms of task scheduling/launching rate and distribution of DVM task placement times, DVM startup and termination overheads on the Summit leadership-class HPC platform. Integrated solution with PMIx/PRRTE enables using an abstracted, standardized set of interfaces for orchestrating the launch process, dynamic process management and monitoring capabilities. It extends scaling capabilities allowing to overcome a limitation of other launching mechanisms (e.g., JSM/LSF). Explored different DVM setup configurations provide insights on DVM performance and a layout to leverage it. Our experimental results show that heterogeneous workload of 65,500 tasks on 2048 nodes, and partitioned across 32 DVMs, runs steady with resource utilization not lower than 52%. While having less concurrently executed tasks resource utilization is able to reach up to 85%, based on results of heterogeneous workload of 8200 tasks on 256 nodes and 2 DVMs.
Creating Apptainer Workflows with Docker-Compose-like Utilities In this presentation, I will explore the utilization of a tool called process-compose, inspired by docker-compose, to create Apptainer-based services. This approach allows for easy deployment and management of fully containerized applications on High Performance Computing (HPC) systems without requiring elevated privileges. Benefits to the Ecosystem: By incorporating process-compose and Apptainer, I aim to address several key challenges in the HPC ecosystem: Simplified Workflow Management: Process-compose provides a user-friendly interface for defining and managing complex containerized application services, reducing the setup time and lowering the barrier to entry for new users. Enhanced Portability: Apptainer ensures that containerized applications can run consistently across different HPC environments, promoting greater portability and reducing compatibility issues. Process-compose is also a single binary that does not need to be installed by admin level users. Community Driven Solutions: This approach aligns with the goals of the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) to advance community-driven solutions. By sharing our experiences and insights, I hope to foster collaboration and innovation within the HPC community. Increased Productivity: The combination of process-compose and Apptainer streamlines the serve deployment process, allowing researchers and developers to focus more on their scientific work rather than the intricacies of system or service administration. Through this presentation, attendees will gain valuable insights into the practical implementation of containerized workflows on HPC systems, learn about the benefits of using process-compose and Apptainer, and understand how these tools can contribute to a more efficient HPC ecosystem.