A trace-driven emulation framework to predict scalability of large clusters in presence of OS Jitter

—Various studies have pointed out the debilitating effects of OS Jitter on the performance of parallel applications on large clusters such as the ASCI Purple and the Mare Nostrum at Barcelona Supercomputing Center. These clusters use commodity OSes such as AIX and Linux respectively. The biggest hindrance in evaluating any technique to mitigate jitter is getting access to such large scale production HPC systems running a commodity OS. An earlier attempt aimed at solving this problem was to emulate the effects of OS jitter on more widely available and jitter-free systems such as BlueGene/L. In this paper, we point out the shortcomings of previous such approaches and present the design and implementation of an emulation framework that helps overcome those shortcomings by using innovative techniques. We collect jitter traces on a commodity OS with a given configuration, under which we want to study the scaling behavior. These traces are then replayed on a jitter-free system to predict ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Pradipta De, Ravi Kothari, Vijay Mann
• Keywords: CLUSTER 2008, Cluster Computing, Commodity Os, Jitter, OS Jitter