Benchmarking the effects of operating system interference on extreme-scale parallel machines

We investigate operating system noise, which we identify as one of the main reasons for a lack of synchronicity in parallel applications. Using a microbenchmark, we measure the noise on several contemporary platforms and find that, even with a general-purpose operating system, noise can be limited if certain precautions are taken. We then inject artificially generated noise into a massively parallel system and measure its influence on the performance of collective operations. Our experiments indicate that on extreme-scale platforms, the performance is correlated with the largest interruption to the application, even if the probability of such an interruption on a single process is extremely small. We demonstrate that synchronizing the noise can significantly reduce its negative influence.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Peter H. Beckman, Kamil Iskra, Kazutomo Yoshii, Susan Coghlan, Aroon Nataraj
• Keywords: CLUSTER 2008, Distributed And Parallel Computing, General-purpose Operating System, Main Reasons, Parallel Applications