Malleable Applications Research Articles

DMRlib: Easy-Coding and Efficient Resource Management for Job Malleability

Process malleability has proved to have a highly positive impact on the resource utilization and global productivity in data centers compared with the conventional static resource allocation policy. However, the non-negligible additional development effort this solution imposes has constrained its adoption by the scientific programming community. In this work, we present DMRlib, a library designed to offer the global advantages of process malleability while providing a minimalist MPI-like syntax. The library includes a series of predefined communication patterns that greatly ease the development of malleable applications. In addition, we deploy several scenarios to demonstrate the positive impact of process malleability featuring different scalability patterns. Concretely, we study two job submission modes (rigid and moldable) in order to identify the best-case scenarios for malleability using metrics such as resource allocation rate, completed jobs per second, and energy consumption. The experiments prove that our elastic approach may improve global throughput by a factor higher than 3x compared to the traditional workloads of non-malleable jobs.

Resource-Aware Data Parallel Array Processing

Malleable applications may run with varying numbers of threads, and thus on varying numbers of cores, while the precise number of threads is irrelevant for the program logic. Malleability is a common property in data-parallel array processing. With ever growing core counts we are increasingly faced with the problem of how to choose the best number of threads. We propose a compiler-directed, almost automatic tuning approach for the functional array processing language SaC. Our approach consists of an offline training phase during which compiler-instrumented application code systematically explores the design space and accumulates a persistent database of profiling data. When generating production code our compiler consults this database and augments each data-parallel operation with a recommendation table. Based on these recommendation tables the runtime system chooses the number of threads individually for each data-parallel operation. With energy/power efficiency becoming an ever greater concern, we explicitly distinguish between two application scenarios: aiming at best possible performance or aiming at a beneficial trade-off between performance and resource investment.

Resilient co-scheduling of malleable applications

Recently, the benefits of co-scheduling several applications have been demonstrated in a fault-free context, both in terms of performance and energy savings. However, large-scale computer systems are confronted by frequent failures, and resilience techniques must be employed for large applications to execute efficiently. Indeed, failures may create severe imbalance between applications and significantly degrade performance. In this article, we aim at minimizing the expected completion time of a set of co-scheduled applications. We propose to redistribute the resources assigned to each application upon the occurrence of failures, and upon the completion of some applications, in order to achieve this goal. First, we introduce a formal model and establish complexity results. The problem is NP-complete for malleable applications, even in a fault-free context. Therefore, we design polynomial-time heuristics that perform redistributions and account for processor failures. A fault simulator is used to perform extensive simulations that demonstrate the usefulness of redistribution and the performance of the proposed heuristics.

Transparently Space Sharing a Multicore Among Multiple Processes

As hardware becomes increasingly parallel and the availability of scalable parallel software improves, the problem of managing multiple multithreaded applications (processes) becomes important. Malleable processes, which can vary the number of threads used as they run, enable sophisticated and flexible resource management. Although many existing applications parallelized for SMPs with parallel runtimes are in fact already malleable, deployed runtime environments provide no interface nor any strategy for intelligently allocating hardware threads or even preventing oversubscription. Prior research methods either depend on profiling applications ahead of time to make good decisions about allocations or do not account for process efficiency at all, leading to poor performance. None of these prior methods have been adapted widely in practice. This article presents the Scheduling and Allocation with Feedback (SCAF) system: a drop-in runtime solution that supports existing malleable applications in making intelligent allocation decisions based on observed efficiency without any changes to semantics, program modification, offline profiling, or even recompilation. Our existing implementation can control most unmodified OpenMP applications. Other malleable threading libraries can also easily be supported with small modifications without requiring application modification or recompilation. In this work, we present the SCAF daemon and a SCAF-aware port of the GNU OpenMP runtime. We present a new technique for estimating process efficiency purely at runtime using available hardware counters and demonstrate its effectiveness in aiding allocation decisions. We evaluated SCAF using NAS NPB parallel benchmarks on five commodity parallel platforms, enumerating architectural features and their effects on our scheme. We measured the benefit of SCAF in terms of sum of speedups improvement (a common metric for multiprogrammed environments) when running all benchmark pairs concurrently compared to equipartitioning—the best existing competing scheme in the literature. We found that SCAF improves on equipartitioning on four out of five machines, showing a mean improvement factor in sum of speedups of 1.04 to 1.11x for benchmark pairs, depending on the machine, and 1.09x on average. Since we are not aware of any widely available tool for equipartitioning, we also compare SCAF against multiprogramming using unmodified OpenMP, which is the only environment available to end users today. SCAF improves on the unmodified OpenMP runtimes for all five machines, with a mean improvement of 1.08 to 2.07x, depending on the machine, and 1.59x on average.

Scalable Power Management for On-Chip Systems with Malleable Applications

We present a scalable Dynamic Power Management (DPM) scheme where malleable applications may change their degree of parallelism at run time depending upon the workload and performance constraints. We employ a per-application predictive power manager that autonomously controls the power states of the cores with the goal of energy efficiency. Furthermore, our DPM allows the applications to lend their idle cores for a short time period to expedite other critical applications. In this way, it allows for application-level scalability, while aiming at the overall system energy optimization. Compared to state-of-the-art centralized and distributed power management approaches, we achieve up to 58 percent (average ≈15-20 percent) ED <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> P reduction.

ADFT: An Adaptive Framework for Fault Tolerance on Large Scale Systems using Application Malleability

Exascale systems of the future are predicted to have mean time between failures (MTBF) of less than one hour. Malleable applications, where the number of processors on which the applications execute can be changed during executions, can make use of their malleability to better tolerate high failure rates. We present AdFT, an adaptive fault tolerance framework for long running malleable applications to maximize application performance in the presence of failures. AdFT framework includes cost models for evaluating the benefits of various fault tolerance actions including checkpointing, live-migration and rescheduling, and runtime decisions for dynamically selecting the fault tolerance actions at different points of application execution to maximize performance. Simulations with real and synthetic failure traces show that our approach outperforms existing fault tolerance mechanisms for malleable applications yielding up to 23% improvement in application performance, and is effective even for petascale systems and beyond.

Malleable applications for scalable high performance computing

Iterative applications are known to run as slow as their slowest computational component. This paper introduces malleability, a new dynamic reconfiguration strategy to overcome this limitation. Malleability is the ability to dynamically change the data size and number of computational entities in an application. Malleability can be used by middleware to autonomously reconfigure an application in response to dynamic changes in resource availability in an architecture-aware manner, allowing applications to optimize the use of multiple processors and diverse memory hierarchies in heterogeneous environments. The modular Internet Operating System (IOS) was extended to reconfigure applications autonomously using malleability. Two different iterative applications were made malleable. The first is used in astronomical modeling, and representative of maximum-likelihood applications was made malleable in the SALSA programming language. The second models the diffusion of heat over a two dimensional object, and is representative of applications such as partial differential equations and some types of distributed simulations. Versions of the heat application were made malleable both in SALSA and MPI. Algorithms for concurrent data redistribution are given for each type of application. Results show that using malleability for reconfiguration is 10 to 100 times faster on the tested environments. The algorithms are also shown to be highly scalable with respect to the quantity of data involved. While previous work has shown the utility of dynamically reconfigurable applications using only computational component migration, malleability is shown to provide up to a 15% speedup over component migration alone on a dynamic cluster environment. This work is part of an ongoing research effort to enable applications to be highly reconfigurable and autonomously modifiable by middleware in order to efficiently utilize distributed environments. Grid computing environments are becoming increasingly heterogeneous and dynamic, placing new demands on applications' adaptive behavior. This work shows that malleability is a key aspect in enabling effective dynamic reconfiguration of iterative applications in these environments.

SRS: A FRAMEWORK FOR DEVELOPING MALLEABLE AND MIGRATABLE PARALLEL APPLICATIONS FOR DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

The ability to produce malleable parallel applications that can be stopped and reconfigured during the execution can offer attractive benefits for both the system and the applications. The reconfiguration can be in terms of varying the parallelism for the applications, changing the data distributions during the executions or dynamically changing the software components involved in the application execution. In distributed and Grid computing systems, migration and reconfiguration of such malleable applications across distributed heterogeneous sites which do not share common file systems provides flexibility for scheduling and resource management in such distributed environments. The present reconfiguration systems do not support migration of parallel applications to distributed locations. In this paper, we discuss a framework for developing malleable and migratable MPI message-passing parallel applications for distributed systems. The framework includes a user-level checkpointing library called SRS and a runtime support system that manages the checkpointed data for distribution to distributed locations. Our experiments and results indicate that the parallel applications, with instrumentation to SRS library, were able to achieve reconfigurability incurring about 15-35% overhead.