Migration Techniques in HPC Environments

Pickartz, Simon; Gad, Ramy; Lankes, Stefan; Nagel, Lars; Süß, Tim; Brinkmann, André; Krempel, Stephan

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-14313-2_41

Cited by 16 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…In previous works, we could show that the overhead of VMs is negligibly small and outweighed by the advantages that come with this high degree of isolation. 5,14 The article is structured as follows: we start with a discussion on related work and background knowledge in Sections 2 and 3, respectively. The Shutdown/Reconnect (S/R) protocol enabling the seamless migration of processes using OS-bypass networks is presented in Section 4, followed by an introduction to our locality-aware extension of the communication stack.…”

Section: Contributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Prospects and challenges of virtual machine migration in HPC

Pickartz

Clauss

Breitbart

et al. 2018

Concurrency and Computation

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Summary The continuous growth of supercomputers is accompanied by increased complexity of the intra‐node level and the interconnection topology. Consequently, the whole software stack ranging from the system software to the applications has to evolve, eg, by means of fault tolerance and support for the rising intra‐node parallelism. Migration techniques are one means to address these challenges. On the one hand, they facilitate the maintenance process by enabling the evacuation of individual nodes during runtime, ie, the implementation of fault avoidance. On the other hand, they enable dynamic load balancing for an improvement of the system's efficiency. However, these prospects come along with certain challenges. On the process level, migration mechanisms have to resolve so‐called residual dependencies to the source node, eg, the communication hardware. On the job level, migrations affect the communication topology, which should be addressed by the communication stack, ie, the optimal communication path between a pair of processes might change after a migration. In this article, we explore migration mechanisms for HPC and discuss their prospects as well as the challenges. Furthermore, we present solutions enabling their efficient usage in this domain. Finally, we evaluate our prototype co‐scheduler leveraging migration for workload optimization.

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Section: Contributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In previous works, we could show that the overhead of VMs is negligibly small and outweighed by the advantages that come with this high degree of isolation. ()…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Prospects and challenges of virtual machine migration in HPC

Pickartz

Clauss

Breitbart

et al. 2018

Concurrency and Computation

Self Cite

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“…Migration techniques can be broadly divided into three categories: processlevel migration, virtual machine migration, and container-based migration [33]. Process-level migration often leverages Checkpoint / Restart (C/R) mechanisms, which allow for capturing snapshots of the current application state comprising all necessary information for the later restart on the same or another node.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In previous studies we investigated different migration techniques and found full virtualization based on Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) [24] to offer high flexibility while providing performance results comparable to a native execution [33] [5]. A drawback of this approach are high migration times caused by the transfer of partly unused and therefore unnecessary memory regions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Zeroing memory deallocator to reduce checkpoint sizes in virtualized HPC environments

et al. 2018

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Virtualization has become an indispensable tool in data centers and Cloud environments to flexibly assign virtual machines (VMs) to resources. Virtualization also becomes more and more attractive for High-performance Computing (HPC). This is mainly due to the strong isolation of VMs which enables: (1) the sharing of cluster nodes and optimization of the system's overall utilization; (2) load balancing by means of migrations due to the reduction of residual dependencies; and (3) the creation of system-level checkpoints increasing the fault tolerance in an application-transparent way. On the downside, the additional virtualization layer conceals information that is only available on the process level. This information has a direct influence on the checkpoint size which should be kept as small as possible. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for checkpoint size reduction in virtualized environments. We exploit the fact that the hypervisor detects zero pages which are omitted when capturing a checkpoint. Moreover, compression techniques are applied for a further reduction of the checkpoint size. We therefore fill freed memory regions with zeros supporting both the zero page detection and the compression. We evaluate our approach by taking the example of HPC applications. The results reveal a reduction of the checkpoint size by up to 9 % when compression is disabled in the hypervisor and up to 49 % with compression enabled. Furthermore, memory zeroing is able to reduce VM migration time by up to 10 % when compression is disabled and by up to 60 % when compression is enabled.

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