Abstract
Accurate and fast simulation of HPC job scheduling is an important tool for exploring the effect of different scheduling strategies on production systems and for providing insight into future HPC design. Current realistic simulations are computationally intensive and cannot provide a rapid feedback loop to facilitate the development of novel scheduling strategies. This work presents a lightweight simulation of the workload manager Slurm that is able to accurately reproduce the performance of the UK’s national supercomputer ARCHER2 using historical workload accounting data. The simulation achieves a speed up of \({\sim }400\) over a period of full system utilisation, allowing for months of activity to be simulated in hours, while maintaining wait times accurate to 7%. The simulator design supports incorporating external factors into scheduling to enable comparison of power-aware strategies. By using the simulation to evaluate the effect of multiple possible scheduling changes to ARCHER2, focusing on improving power management, the potential to provide insight into configuration changes and extensions to the scheduling logic is demonstrated.
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Acknowledgements
This work used the ARCHER2 UK National Supercomputing Service (https://www.archer2.ac.uk). We would like to thank Dr Andrew Turner from EPCC for valuable discussions during development and validation with ARCHER2. Thanks to the Cambridge Service for Data Driven Discovery (CSD3) at the University of Cambridge for providing access to workload data. We acknowledge support of CSC who provided access to scheduler data from the LUMI system, owned by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.
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Wilkinson, A., Jones, J., Richardson, H., Dykes, T., Haus, UU. (2023). A Fast Simulator to Enable HPC Scheduling Strategy Comparisons. In: Bienz, A., Weiland, M., Baboulin, M., Kruse, C. (eds) High Performance Computing. ISC High Performance 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13999. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40843-4_24
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