Mitigating Inter-Job Interference via Process-Level Quality-of-Service

Abstract

Jobs on most high-performance computing (HPC) systems share the network with other concurrently executing jobs. Network sharing leads to contention that can severely degrade performance. Here we investigate the use of Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms to reduce the negative impacts of network contention. QoS allows users to manage resource sharing between network flows and to provide bandwidth guarantees to specific flows. Our results show that careful use of QoS reduces the impact of network contention for specific jobs, resulting in up to a 40% performance improvement. In some cases, it completely eliminates the impact of contention. It achieves these improvements with limited negative impact to other jobs; any job that experiences performance loss typically degrades less than 5%, and often much less. Our approach can help ensure that HPC machines maintain high levels of throughput as per-node compute power continues to increase faster than network bandwidth.