Live Webcast 15th Annual Charm++ Workshop

Building future generation supercomputers while constraining their power consumption is one of the biggest challenges faced by the HPC community. For example, US Department of Energy has set a goal of 20 MW for an exascale supercomputer. To realize this goal, a lot of research is being done to revolutionize hardware design to build power efficient computers and network interconnects. In this work, we propose a software-based online resource management system that leverages hardware facilitated capability to constrain the power consumption of each node in order to judicially allocate power and nodes to a job. Our scheme uses this hardware capability in conjunction with an adaptive runtime system that can dynamically change the resource configuration of a running job allowing our resource manager to re-optimize allocation decisions to running jobs as new jobs arrive or a running job terminates. We also propose a performance modeling scheme that estimates the essential power characteristics of a job at any scale. The proposed online resource manager uses these performance characteristics for making scheduling and resource allocation decisions that maximize the job throughput of the supercomputer under a given power budget. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach by using a mix of jobs with different power-response characteristics. We show that with a power budget of 4.75 MW, we can obtain up to 5.2X improvement in job throughput when compared with the SLURM baseline scheduling policy. We corroborate our results with real experiments on a relatively small scale in which we obtain a 1.7X improvement.