Section: Research Program

Platform-aware scheduling strategies

In this theme, we study and design scheduling strategies, focusing either on energy consumption or on memory behavior. In other words, when designing and evaluating these strategies, we do not limit our view to the most classical platform characteristics, that is, the computing speed of cores and accelerators, and the bandwidth of communication links.

In most existing studies, a single optimization objective is considered, and the target is some sort of absolute performance. For instance, most optimization problems aim at the minimization of the overall execution time of the application considered. Such an approach can lead to a very significant waste of resources, because it does not take into account any notion of efficiency nor of yield. For instance, it may not be meaningful to use twice as many resources just to decrease by 10% the execution time. In all our work, we plan to look only for algorithmic solutions that make a “clever” usage of resources. However, looking for the solution that optimizes a metric such as the efficiency, the energy consumption, or the memory-peak minimization, is doomed for the type of applications we consider. Indeed, in most cases, any optimal solution for such a metric is a sequential solution, and sequential solutions have prohibitive execution times. Therefore, it becomes mandatory to consider multi-criteria approaches where one looks for trade-offs between some user-oriented metrics that are typically related to notions of Quality of Service—execution time, response time, stretch, throughput, latency, reliability, etc.—and some system-oriented metrics that guarantee that resources are not wasted. In general, we will not look for the Pareto curve, that is, the set of all dominating solutions for the considered metrics. Instead, we will rather look for solutions that minimize some given objective while satisfying some bounds, or “budgets”, on all the other objectives.

Energy-aware algorithms

Energy-aware scheduling has proven an important issue in the past decade, both for economical and environmental reasons. Energy issues are obvious for battery-powered systems. They are now also important for traditional computer systems. Indeed, the design specifications of any new computing platform now always include an upper bound on energy consumption. Furthermore, the energy bill of a supercomputer may represent a significant share of its cost over its lifespan.

Technically, a processor running at speed $s$ dissipates $s^{\alpha }$ watts per unit of time with $2\le \alpha \le 3$ [63], [64], [69]; hence, it consumes $s^{\alpha }\times d$ joules when operated during $d$ units of time. Therefore, energy consumption can be reduced by using speed scaling techniques. However it was shown in [84] that reducing the speed of a processor increases the rate of transient faults in the system. The probability of faults increases exponentially, and this probability cannot be neglected in large-scale computing [80]. In order to make up for the loss in reliability due to the energy efficiency, different models have been proposed for fault tolerance: (i) re-execution consists in re-executing a task that does not meet the reliability constraint [84]; (ii) replication consists in executing the same task on several processors simultaneously, in order to meet the reliability constraints [62]; and (iii) checkpointing consists in “saving” the work done at some certain instants, hence reducing the amount of work lost when a failure occurs [79].

Energy issues must be taken into account at all levels, including the algorithm-design level. We plan to both evaluate the energy consumption of existing algorithms and to design new algorithms that minimize energy consumption using tools such as resource selection, dynamic frequency and voltage scaling, or powering-down of hardware components.

Memory-aware algorithms

For many years, the bandwidth between memories and processors has increased more slowly than the computing power of processors, and the latency of memory accesses has been improved at an even slower pace. Therefore, in the time needed for a processor to perform a floating point operation, the amount of data transferred between the memory and the processor has been decreasing with each passing year. The risk is for an application to reach a point where the time needed to solve a problem is no longer dictated by the processor computing power but by the memory characteristics, comparable to the memory wall that limits CPU performance. In such a case, processors would be greatly under-utilized, and a large part of the computing power of the platform would be wasted. Moreover, with the advent of multicore processors, the amount of memory per core has started to stagnate, if not to decrease. This is especially harmful to memory intensive applications. The problems related to the sizes and the bandwidths of memories are further exacerbated on modern computing platforms because of their deep and highly heterogeneous hierarchies. Such a hierarchy can extend from core private caches to shared memory within a CPU, to disk storage and even tape-based storage systems, like in the Blue Waters supercomputer [55]. It may also be the case that heterogeneous cores are used (such as hybrid CPU and GPU computing), and that each of them has a limited memory.

Because of these trends, it is becoming more and more important to precisely take memory constraints into account when designing algorithms. One must not only take care of the amount of memory required to run an algorithm, but also of the way this memory is accessed. Indeed, in some cases, rather than to minimize the amount of memory required to solve the given problem, one will have to maximize data reuse and, especially, to minimize the amount of data transferred between the different levels of the memory hierarchy (minimization of the volume of memory inputs-outputs). This is, for instance, the case when a problem cannot be solved by just using the in-core memory and that any solution must be out-of-core, that is, must use disks as storage for temporary data.

It is worth noting that the cost of moving data has lead to the development of so called “communication-avoiding algorithms” [76]. Our approach is orthogonal to these efforts: in communication-avoiding algorithms, the application is modified, in particular some redundant work is done, in order to get rid of some communication operations, whereas in our approach, we do not modify the application, which is provided as a task graph, but we minimize the needed memory peak only by carefully scheduling tasks.