SystemBurn: Principles of Design and Operation Release 3.1

Abstract

As high performance computing technology progresses toward the progressively more extreme scales required to address critical computational problems of both national and global interest, power and cooling for these extreme scale systems is becoming a growing concern. A standardized methodology for testing system requirements under maximal system load and validating system environmental capability to meet those requirements is critical to maintaining system stability and minimizing power and cooling risks for high end data centers. Moreover, accurate testing permits the high end data center to avoid issues of under-or over-provisioning power and cooling capacity saving resources and mitigating hazards. Previous approaches to such testing have employed an ad hoc collection of tools, which have been anecdotally perceived to produce a heavy system load. In this report, we present SystemBurn, a software tool engineered to allow a system user to methodically create a maximal system load on large scale systems for the purposes of testing and validation.2

Application Power Signature Analysis

“…10) Graph500 (graph500) [29]. Note that benchmark names with the sb prefix indicate that they come from SystemBurn [28]. SystemBurn is a software tool engineered to allow a system user to methodically create a maximal system load on large scale systems for the purposes of testing and validation.…”

Power Signatures of High-Performance Computing Workloads

“…number of cores) whenever possible. Benchmark names with the sb prefix come from the SystemBurn software tool [36]. SystemBurn allows users to methodically create a maximal system load for testing and validation purposes, and the benchmarks listed are among the sample workloads it provides.…”