Performance Evaluation of Applications for Heterogeneous Systems by means of Performance Probes
Alexandre Strube, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament d'Arquitectura de Computadors i Sistemes Operatius · LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · 2011
This work describes a novel way to select the best computer node out of a pool of available potentially heterogeneous computing nodes for the execution of computational tasks. This is a very basic and difficult problem of computer science and computing centres tried to get around it by using only homogeneous compute clusters. Usually this fails as like any technical equipment, clusters get extended, adapted or repaired over time, and you end up with a heterogeneous configuration. So far, the solution for this, was: • To leave it to the users to choose the right node(s) for execution, or • To make an extensive test battery, executing and measuring all possible tasks on every type of computing node available in the pool. In the typical case, where a large number of tasks would need to be tested on many different types of nodes, this could use a lot of computing resources, sometimes even more than the actual execution one wants to optimize. History of previous executions is a variant. • Run a series of synthetic benchmarks that would create an abstract performance model of the available nodes. In a specific situation (hierarchical multi-clusters- see figure 1), the situation is worse, as the con-