Power-aware dynamic placement of HPC applications

  • Authors:

  • Akshat Verma;Puneet Ahuja;Anindya Neogi

  • Affiliations:

  • IBM India Research Lab, New Delhi, India;IIT Delhi, Delhi, India;IBM India Research Lab, Delhi, India

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 22nd annual international conference on Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

High Performance Computing applications and platforms have been typically designed without regard to power consumption. With increased awareness of energy cost, power management is now an issue even for compute-intensive server clusters. In this work, we investigate the use of power management techniques for high performance applications on modern power-efficient servers with virtualization support. We consider power management techniques such as dynamic consolidation and usage of dynamic power range enabled by low power states on servers. We identify application performance isolation and virtualization overhead with multiple virtual machines as the key bottlenecks for server consolidation. We perform a comprehensive experimental study to identify the scenarios where applications are isolated from each other. We also establish that the power consumed by HPC applications may be application dependent, non-linear and have a large dynamic range. We show that for HPC applications, working set size is a key parameter to take care of while placing applications on virtualized servers. We use the insights obtained from our experimental study to present a framework and methodology for power-aware application placement for HPC applications.