text: With the ever-growing need of data in HPC applications, the congestion at the I O level becomes critical in super-computers. Architectural enhancement such as burst-buffers and pre-fetching are added to machines, but are not sufficient to prevent congestion. Recent online I O scheduling strategies have been put in place, but they add an additional congestion point and overheads in the computation of applications. In this work, we show how to take advantage of the periodic nature of HPC applications in order to develop efficient periodic scheduling strategies for their I O transfers. Our strategy computes once during the job scheduling phase a pattern where it defines the I O behavior for each application, after which the applications run independently, transferring their I O at the specified times. Our strategy limits the amount of I O congestion at the I O node level and can be easily integrated into current job schedulers. We validate this model through extensive simulations and experiments by comparing it to state-of-the-art online solutions, showing that not only our scheduler has the advantage of being de-centralized and thus overcoming the overhead of online schedulers, but also that it performs better than these solutions, improving the application dilation up to 13 and the maximum system efficiency up to 18 .
  @cite_21: Unmatched computation and storage performance in new HPC systems have led to a plethora of I O optimizations ranging from application-side collective I O to network and disk-level request scheduling on the file system side. As we deal with ever larger machines, the interferences produced by multiple applications accessing a shared parallel file system in a concurrent manner become a major problem. These interferences often break single-application I O optimizations, dramatically degrading application I O performance and, as a result, lowering machine wide efficiency. This paper focuses on CALCioM, a framework that aims to mitigate I O interference through the dynamic selection of appropriate scheduling policies. CALCioM allows several applications running on a supercomputer to communicate and coordinate their I O strategy in order to avoid interfering with one another. In this work, we examine four I O strategies that can be accommodated in this framework: serializing, interrupting, interfering and coordinating. Experiments on Argonne's BG P Surveyor machine and on several clusters of the French Grid'5000 show how CALCioM can be used to efficiently and transparently improve the scheduling strategy between two otherwise interfering applications, given specified metrics of machine wide efficiency.
  @cite_12: 
  @cite_2: A significant percentage of the computing capacity of large-scale platforms is wasted because of interferences incurred by multiple applications that access a shared parallel file system concurrently. One solution to handling I O bursts enlarge-scale HPC systems is to absorb them at an intermediate storage layer consisting of burst buffers. However, our analysis of the Argonne's Mira system shows that burst buffers cannot prevent congestion at all times. Consequently, I O performances dramatically degraded, showing in some cases a decrease in I O throughput of 67 . In this paper, we analyze the effects of interference on application I O bandwidth and propose several scheduling techniques to mitigate congestion. We show through extensive experiments that our global I O scheduler is able to reduce the effects of congestion, even on systems where burst buffers are used, and can increase the overall system throughput up to 56 . We also show that it outperforms current Mira I O schedulers.
summary: Closer to this work, online schedulers for HPC systems were developed such as our previous work @cite_2 , the study by @cite_12 , and a solution proposed by @cite_21 . @cite_21 , the authors investigate the interference of two applications and analyze the benefits of interrupting or delaying either one in order to avoid congestion. Unfortunately their approach cannot be used for more than two applications. Another main difference with our previous work is the light-weight approach of this study where the computation is only done once.