Anomaly detection in supercomputers is a very difficult problem due to the big scale of the systems and the high number of components. The current state of the art for automated anomaly detection employs Machine Learning methods or statistical regression models in a supervised fashion, meaning that the detection tool is trained to distinguish among a fixed set of behaviour classes (healthy and unhealthy states).

Reliability is a cumbersome problem in High Performance Computing Systems and Data Centers evolution. During operation, several types of fault conditions or anomalies can arise, ranging from malfunctioning hardware to improper configurations or imperfect software. Currently, system administrator and final users have to discover it manually. Clearly this approach does not scale to large scale supercomputers and facilities: automated methods to detect faults and unhealthy conditions is needed. Our method uses a type of neural network called autoncoder trained to learn the normal behavior of a real, in-production HPC system and it is deployed on the edge of each computing node. We obtain a very good accuracy (values ranging between 90% and 95%) and we also demonstrate that the approach can be deployed on the supercomputer nodes without negatively affecting the computing units performance.

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In their quest towards Exascale, High Performance Computing (HPC) systems are rapidly becoming larger and more complex, together with the issues concerning their maintenance. Luckily, many current HPC systems are endowed with data monitoring infrastructures that characterize the system state, and whose data can be used to train Deep Learning (DL) anomaly detection models, a very popular research area. However, the lack of labels describing the state of the system is a wide-spread issue, as annotating data is a costly task, generally falling on human system administrators and thus does not scale toward exascale.In this work we investigate the possibility to extract labels from a service monitoring tool (Nagios) currently used by HPC system administrators to flag the nodes which undergo maintenance operations. This allows to automatically annotate data collected by a fine-grained monitoring infrastructure; this labelled data is then used to train and validate a DL model for anomaly detection. We conduct the experimental evaluation on a tier-0 production supercomputer hosted at CINECA, Bologna, Italy. The results reveal that the DL model can accurately detect the real failures, and, moreover, it can predict the insurgency of anomalies, by systematically anticipating the actual labels (i.e. the moment when system administrators realize when an anomalous event happened); the average advance time computed on historical traces is around 45 minutes. The proposed technology can be easily scaled toward exascale systems to easy their maintenance.

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