Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “File System”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 271 records · Page 15

Characterizing Machine Learning I/O Workloads on Leadership Scale HPC Systems

High performance computing (HPC) is no longer solely limited to traditional workloads such as simulation and modeling. With the increase in the popularity of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) technologies, we are observing that an increasing number of HPC users are incorporating ML methods into their workflow and scientific discovery processes, across a wide spectrum of science domains such as biology, earth science, and physics. This gives rise to a diverse set of I/O patterns than the traditional checkpoint/restart-based HPC I/O behavior. The details of the I/O characteristics of such ML I/O workloads have not been studied extensively for large-scale leadership HPC systems. This paper aims to fill that gap by providing an in-depth analysis to gain an understanding of the I/O behavior of ML I/O workloads using darshan - an I/O characterization tool designed for lightweight tracing and profiling. We study the darshan logs of more than 23, 000 HPC ML I/O jobs over a time period of one year running on Summit - the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. This paper provides a systematic I/O characterization of ML I/O jobs running on a leadership scale supercomputer to understand how the I/O behavior differs across science domains and the scale of workloads, and analyze the usage of parallel file system and burst buffer by ML I/O workloads.

Paul, Arnab↗

Orchestrator Telemetry Processing Pipeline

Orchestrator is a software application infrastructure for telemetry monitoring, logging, processing, and distribution. The architecture has been applied to support operations of a variety of planetary rovers. Built in Java with the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, Orchestrator can run on most commonly used operating systems. The pipeline supports configurable parallel processing that can significantly reduce the time needed to process a large volume of data products. Processors in the pipeline implement a simple Java interface and declare their required input from upstream processors. Orchestrator is programmatically constructed by specifying a list of Java processor classes that are initiated at runtime to form the pipeline. Input dependencies are checked at runtime. Fault tolerance can be configured to attempt continuation of processing in the event of an error or failed input dependency if possible, or to abort further processing when an error is detected. This innovation also provides support for Java Message Service broadcasts of telemetry objects to clients and provides a file system and relational database logging of telemetry. Orchestrator supports remote monitoring and control of the pipeline using browser-based JMX controls and provides several integration paths for pre-compiled legacy data processors. At the time of this reporting, the Orchestrator architecture has been used by four NASA customers to build telemetry pipelines to support field operations. Example applications include high-volume stereo image capture and processing, simultaneous data monitoring and logging from multiple vehicles. Example telemetry processors used in field test operations support include vehicle position, attitude, articulation, GPS location, power, and stereo images.

Powell, Mark↗

Performance Data Gathering and Representation from Fixed-Size Statistical Data

The two commonly-used performance data types in the super-computing community, statistics and event traces, are discussed and compared. Statistical data are much more compact but lack the probative power event traces offer. Event traces, on the other hand, are unbounded and can easily fill up the entire file system during program execution. In this paper, we propose an innovative methodology for performance data gathering and representation that offers a middle ground. Two basic ideas are employed: the use of averages to replace recording data for each instance and 'formulae' to represent sequences associated with communication and control flow. The user can trade off tracing overhead, trace data size with data quality incrementally. In other words, the user will be able to limit the amount of trace data collected and, at the same time, carry out some of the analysis event traces offer using space-time views. With the help of a few simple examples, we illustrate the use of these techniques in performance tuning and compare the quality of the traces we collected with event traces. We found that the trace files thus obtained are, indeed, small, bounded and predictable before program execution, and that the quality of the space-time views generated from these statistical data are excellent. Furthermore, experimental results showed that the formulae proposed were able to capture all the sequences associated with 11 of the 15 applications tested. The performance of the formulae can be incrementally improved by allocating more memory at runtime to learn longer sequences.

Yan, Jerry C.↗

Using Transparent Informed Prefetching (TIP) to reduce file read latency

As processor performance gains continue to outstrip Input/Output gains, I/O performance is becoming critical to overall system performance. File read latency is the most significant bottleneck for high performance I/O. Other aspects of I/O performance benefit from recent advances in disk bandwidth and throughput resulting from disk arrays, and in write performance derived from buffered write behind and the Log-structured File System. The access gap problem limiting improvements in read latency is exacerbated by distributed file systems operating over networks with diverse bandwidth. Focus is on extending the power of caching and prefetching to reduce file read latencies by exploiting hints from high-levels of a system. Such Transparent Informed Prefetching, TIP, and its benefits are described. It is argued that hints that disclose high level knowledge are a means for transferring optimization information across, without violating, module boundaries. How TIP can be used to convert the high throughput of new technologies such as disk arrays and log-structured file systems into low latency for applications is discussed. Our preliminary experiments show reductions in wall - clock execution time of 13 percent and 20 percent for a multiple module compilation tool (make) accessing data on a local disk and remote Coda file server, respectively, and a reduction of 30 percent for a text search (grep) remotely accessing many small files.

Patterson, R. H.↗

Evaluation of DVD-R for Archival Applications

For more than a decade, CD-ROM and CD-R have provided an unprecedented level of reliability, low cost and cross-platform compatibility to support federal data archiving and distribution efforts. However, it should be remembered that years of effort were required to achieve the standardization that has supported the growth of the CD industry. Incompatibilities in the interpretation of the ISO-9660 standard on different operating systems had to be dealt with, and the imprecise specifications in the Orange Book Part n and Part Hi led to incompatibilities between CD-R media and CD-R recorders. Some of these issues were presented by the authors at Optical Data Storage '95. The major current problem with the use of CD technology is the growing volume of digital data that needs to be stored. CD-ROM collections of hundreds of volumes and CD-R collections of several thousand volumes are becoming almost too cumbersome to be useful. The emergence of Digital Video Disks Recorder (DVD-R) technology promises to reduce the number of discs required for archive applications by a factor of seven while providing improved reliability. It is important to identify problem areas for DVD-R media and provide guidelines to manufacturers, file system developers and users in order to provide reliable data storage and interchange. The Data Distribution Laboratory (DDL) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory began its evaluation of DVD-R technology in early 1998. The initial plan was to obtain a DVD-Recorder for preliminary testing, deploy reader hardware to user sites for compatibility testing, evaluate the quality and longevity of DVD-R media and develop proof-of-concept archive collections to test the reliability and usability of DVD-R media and jukebox hardware.

Martin, Michael D.↗

Constructing Space-Time Views from Fixed Size Statistical Data: Getting the Best of Both Worlds

Many performance monitoring tools are currently available to the super-computing community. The performance data gathered and analyzed by these tools fall under two categories: statistics and event traces. Statistical data is much more compact but lacks the probative power event traces offer. Event traces, on the other hand, can easily fill up the entire file system during execution such that the instrumented execution may have to be terminated half way through. In this paper, we propose an innovative methodology for performance data gathering and representation that offers a middle ground. The user can trade-off tracing overhead, trace data size vs. data quality incrementally. In other words, the user will be able to limit the amount of trace collected and, at the same time, carry out some of the analysis event traces offer using spacetime views for the entire execution. Two basic ideas are employed: the use of averages to replace recording data for each instance and "formulae" to represent sequences associated with communication and control flow. With the help of a few simple examples, we illustrate the use of these techniques in performance tuning and compare the quality of the traces we collected vs. event traces. We found that the trace files thus obtained are, in deed, small, bounded and predictable before program execution and that the quality of the space time views generated from these statistical data are excellent. Furthermore, experimental results showed that the formulae proposed were able to capture 100% of all the sequences associated with 11 of the 15 applications tested. The performance of the formulae can be incrementally improved by allocating more memory at run-time to learn longer sequences.

Schmidt, Melisa↗

Constructing Space-Time Views from Fixed Size Statistical Data: Getting the Best of both Worlds

Many performance monitoring tools are currently available to the super-computing community. The performance data gathered and analyzed by these tools fall under two categories: statistics and event traces. Statistical data is much more compact but lacks the probative power event traces offer. Event traces, on the other hand, can easily fill up the entire file system during execution such that the instrumented execution may have to be terminated half way through. In this paper, we propose an innovative methodology for performance data gathering and representation that offers a middle ground. The user can trade-off tracing overhead, trace data size vs. data quality incrementally. In other words, the user will be able to limit the amount of trace collected and, at the same time, carry out some of the analysis event traces offer using space-time views for the entire execution. Two basic ideas arc employed: the use of averages to replace recording data for each instance and formulae to represent sequences associated with communication and control flow. With the help of a few simple examples, we illustrate the use of these techniques in performance tuning and compare the quality of the traces we collected vs. event traces. We found that the trace files thus obtained are, in deed, small, bounded and predictable before program execution and that the quality of the space time views generated from these statistical data are excellent. Furthermore, experimental results showed that the formulae proposed were able to capture 100% of all the sequences associated with 11 of the 15 applications tested. The performance of the formulae can be incrementally improved by allocating more memory at run-time to learn longer sequences.

Schmidt, Melisa↗

A quantitative model of application slow-down in multi-resource shared systems

Scheduling multiple jobs onto a platform enhances system utilization by sharing resources. The benefits from higher resource utilization include reduced cost to construct, operate, and maintain a system, which often include energy consumption. Maximizing these benefits comes at a price-resource contention among jobs increases job completion time. In this study, we analyze slow-downs of jobs due to contention for multiple resources in a system; referred to as dilation factor. We observe that multiple-resource contention creates non-linear dilation factors of jobs. From this observation, we establish a general quantitative model for dilation factors of jobs in multi-resource systems. A job is characterized by a vector-valued loading statistics and dilation factors of a job set are given by a quadratic function of their loading vectors. We demonstrate how to systematically characterize a job, maintain the data structure to calculate the dilation factor (loading matrix), and calculate the dilation factor of each job. We validate the accuracy of the model with multiple processes running on a native Linux server, virtualized servers, and with multiple MapReduce workloads co-scheduled in a cluster. Evaluation with measured data shows that the D-factor model has an error margin of less than 16%. We extended the D-factor model to capture the slow-down of applications when multiple identical resources exist such as multi-core environments and multi-disks environments. Finally, validation results of the extended D-factor model with HPC checkpoint applications on the parallel file systems show that D-factor accurately captures the slow down of concurrent applications in such environments.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Frameworks, Algorithms, and Scalable Technologies for Mathematics (FASTMath) SciDAC Institute

As computational models scale to larger computers, the rate at which they produce data has far outstripped the same computers ability to write that data and further the file systems ability to store that data. Almost all of the SciDAC applications, but especially those related to fusion solve very large scale PDEs whose scientific output his impacted by this problem. To gain access to dynamics in an exascale simulation that are not identifiable a priori and to make that dynamical data available to machine learning requires fundamental research in the area of in situ data data analytics. Here data analytics includes compression, visualization, uncertainty quantification, and machine learning. This in situ data analytics will enable on-the-fly spatial and temporal compression of solution dynamics, expose that space-time compressed field to machine learning algorithms that have been specialized to work with dynamically evolving data (existing machine learning algorithms treat data sets as static), greatly improving the opportunity for machine learning to provide feedback to the compression, all within an ongoing simulation, without the need to write data to files. The same concepts are also being applied to uncertainty quantification and multi-fidelity modeling which have similar needs for spatial and temporal compression of the ongoing exascale simulation to perform either without the typical, unacceptable writing of data to files.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

funcX: Federated Function as a Service for Science

Here, funcX is a distributed function as a service (FaaS) platform that enables flexible, scalable, and high performance remote function execution. Unlike centralized FaaS systems, funcX decouples the cloud-hosted management functionality from the edge-hosted execution functionality. funcX's endpoint software can be deployed, by users or administrators, on arbitrary laptops, clouds, clusters, and supercomputers, in effect turning them into function serving systems. funcX's cloud-hosted service provides a single location for registering, sharing, and managing both functions and endpoints. It allows for transparent, secure, and reliable function execution across the federated ecosystem of endpoints-enabling users to route functions to endpoints based on specific needs. funcX uses containers (e.g., Docker, Singularity, and Shifter) to provide common execution environments across endpoints. funcX implements various container management strategies to execute functions with high performance and efficiency on diverse funcX endpoints. funcX also integrates with an in-memory data store and Globus for managing data that may span endpoints. We motivate the need for funcX, present our prototype design and implementation, and demonstrate, via experiments on two supercomputers, that funcX can scale to more than 130000 concurrent workers. We show that funcX's container warming-aware routing algorithm can reduce the completion time for 3,000 functions by up to 61% compared to a randomized algorithm and the in-memory data store can speed up data transfers by up to 3x compared to a shared file system.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Dynamic Distribution of High-Rate Data Processing from CERN to Remote HPC Data Centers

The prompt reconstruction of the data recorded from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detectors has always been addressed by dedicated resources at the CERN Tier-0. Such workloads come in spikes due to the nature of the operation of the accelerator and in special high load occasions experiments have commissioned methods to distribute (spill-over) a fraction of the load to sites outside CERN. The present work demonstrates a new way of supporting the Tier-0 environment by provisioning resources elastically for such spilled-over workflows onto the Piz Daint Supercomputer at CSCS. Furthermore, this is implemented using containers, tuning the existing batch scheduler and reinforcing the scratch file system, while still using standard Grid middleware. ATLAS, CMS and CSCS have jointly run selected prompt data reconstruction on up to several thousand cores on Piz Daint into a shared environment, thereby probing the viability of the CSCS high performance computer site as on demand extension of the CERN Tier-0, which could play a role in addressing the future LHC computing challenges for the high luminosity LHC.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Measuring the impact of burst buffers on data-intensive scientific workflows

Science applications frequently produce and consume large volumes of data, but delivering this data to and from compute resources can be concerning, as parallel file system performance is not keeping up with compute and memory performance. To alter this I/O bottleneck, some systems have deployed burst buffers, but their impact on performance for real-world scientific workflow applications is still not clear. In this paper, we examine the impact of burst buffers through the remote-shared, allocatable burst buffers on the Cori system at NERSC. By running two data-intensive workflows, a high-throughput genome analysis workflow, and a subset of the SCEC high-performance CyberShake workflow, a production seismic hazard analysis workflow, we find that using burst buffers offers read and write improvements of an order of magnitude, and these improvements lead to increased job performance, and thereby increased overall workflow performance, even for long-running CPU-bound jobs.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Enabling machine learning-ready HPC ensembles with Merlin

With the growing complexity of computational and experimental facilities, many scientific researchers are turning to machine learning (ML) techniques to analyze large scale ensemble data. With complexities such as multi-component workflows, heterogeneous machine architectures, parallel file systems, and batch scheduling, care must be taken to facilitate this analysis in a high performance computing (HPC) environment. Here, we present Merlin, a workflow framework to enable large ML-friendly ensembles of scientific HPC simulations. By augmenting traditional HPC with distributed compute technologies, Merlin aims to lower the barrier for scientific subject matter experts to incorporate ML into their analysis. As a producer–consumer workflow model, Merlin enables multi-machine, cross-batch job, dynamically allocated yet persistent workflows capable of utilizing surge-compute resources. Key features of Merlin are a flexible HPC-centric interface, low per-task overhead, multi-tiered fault recovery, and a hierarchical sampling algorithm that allows for $\mathscr{O}$(N) task execution and $\mathscr{O}$(N ln N) task queuing to ensembles of millions of tasks. In addition to Merlin’s design, we test the algorithm’s performance in an HPC center and demonstrate the ability to enqueue 40 million simulations in 100 s, with a 30 millisecond per-task overhead that is independent of ensemble size. Finally, we describe some example applications that Merlin has enabled on leadership-class HPC resources, such as the ML-augmented optimization of nuclear fusion experiments and the calibration of infectious disease models to study the progression of and possible mitigation strategies for COVID-19.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

The Open High Throughput Computing Content Delivery Network

LHC experiments make extensive use of web proxy caches, especially for software distribution via the CernVM File System and for conditions data via the Frontier Distributed Database Caching system. Since many jobs read the same data, cache hit rates are high and hence most of the traffic flows efficiently over Local Area Networks. However, it is not always possible to have local web caches, particularly for opportunistic cases whereexperiments have little control over site services. The Open High Throughput Computing (HTC) Content Delivery Network (CDN), openhtc.io, aims to address this by using web proxy caches from a commercial CDN provider. Cloudflare provides a simple interface for registering DNS aliases of any web server and does reverse proxy web caching on those aliases. The openhtc.io domain is hosted on Cloudflare's free tier CDN which has no bandwidth limit and makes use of data centers throughout the world, so the average performance for clients is much improved compared to reading from CERN or a Tier 1. The load on WLCG servers is also significantly reduced. WLCG Web Proxy Auto Discovery is used to select local web caches when they are available and otherwise select openhtc.io caching. This paper describes the Open HTC CDN in detail and provides initial results from its use for LHC@Home and USCMS opportunistic computing.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

ROOT RNTuple and EOS: The Next Generation of Event Data I/O

For several years, the ROOT team is developing the new RNTuple I/O subsystem in preparation of the next generation of collider experiments. Both HL-LHC and DUNE are expected to start data taking by the end of this decade. They pose unprecedented challenges to event data I/O in terms of data rates, event sizes, and event complexity. At the same time, the I/O landscape is becoming more diverse. HPC cluster file systems and object stores, NVMe disk cache layers in analysis facilities, and S3 storage on cloud resources are mixing with traditional XRootD-managed spinning disk pools.The ROOT team will finalize a first production version of the RNTuple binary format by the end of 2024. After this point, ROOT will provide backward compatibility for RNTuple data. This contribution provides an overview of the RNTuple feature set, the related R&D activities and the long-term vision for RNTuple. We report on performance, interface design, tooling, robustness, integration with experiment frameworks, and validation results, as well as recent R&D on parallel reading and writing and exploitation of modern hardware and storage systems. We will give an outlook on possible future features after a first production release.Collaboratively, the IT and EP departments at CERN have launched a formal project within the Research and Computing sector to evaluate the novel data format for physics analysis data utilized in LHC experiments and other fields. This part of the project focuses on validating the scalability of the EOS storage backend during the transition from the over 25 years old TTree production format to the newly developed RNTuple format, using both replicated and erasure-coded storage profiles.

Blomer, Jakob [CERN]↗

STAR Data Production Workflow on HPC: Lessons Learned & Best Practices

The Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) is a multi-national supported experiment located at Brookhaven National Lab. The raw physics data captured from the detector is on the order of tens of PBytes per data acquisition campaign, which makes STAR fit well within the definition of a big data science experiment. The production of the data has typically run on standard nodes or on standard Grid computing environments. All embedding simulations (complex workflow mixing real and simulated events) have been run on standard Linux resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) aka PDSF. However, HPC resources such as Cori have become available for STAR's data production as well as embedding, and STAR has been the very first experiment to show feasibility of running a sustainable data production campaign on this computing resource. The use of Docker containers with Shifter is required to run on HPC @ NERSC - this approach encapsulates the environment in which a standard STAR workflow runs. From the deployment of a tailored Scientific Linux environment (requiring many of its own libraries and special configurations required to run) to the deployment of third-party software and the STAR specific software stack, it has become impractical to rely on a set of containers containing each specific software release. To this extent, solutions based on the CERN VM File System (CVMFS) for the deployment of software and services have been employed in HENP, but one needs to make careful scalability considerations when using a resource like Cori, such as not allowing all software to be deployed in containers or bare node. Additionally, CVMFS clients are not compatible on Cori nodes and one needs to rely on an indirect NFS/DVS mount scheme. In our contribution, we will discuss our strategies from the past and our current solution based on CVMFS. Furthermore, running on HPC is not a simple task as each aspect of the workflow must be enabled to scale, run efficiently, and the workflow needs to fit within the boundaries of the provided queue system (SLURM in this case). Lastly, we will also discuss what we have learned so far about what is the best method for grouping jobs to maximize a single 48 core HPC node within a specific time frame and maximize our workflow efficiency.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

A machine-learning-driven data labeling pipeline for scientific analysis in MLExchange

This study introduces a novel labeling pipeline to accelerate the labeling process of scientific data sets by using artificial intelligence (AI)-guided tagging techniques. This pipeline includes a set of interconnected web-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs), where Data Clinic and MLCoach enable the preparation of machine learning (ML) models for data reduction and classification, respectively, while Label Maker is used for label assignment. Throughout this pipeline, data can be accessed through a direct connection to a file system or through Tiled for access through Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Our experimental results present three use cases where this labeling pipeline has been instrumental for the study of large X-ray scattering data sets in the area of pattern recognition, the remote analysis of resonant soft X-ray scattering data and the fine-tuning process of foundation models. These use cases highlight the labeling capabilities of this pipeline, including the ability to label large data sets in a short period of time, to perform remote data analysis while minimizing data movement and to enhance the fine-tuning process of complex ML models with human involvement.

Chavez, Tanny (ORCID:0000000193172896)↗

A Zoom-in Analysis of I/O Logs to Detect Root Causes of I/O Performance Bottlenecks

Scientific applications frequently spend a large fraction of their execution time in reading and writing data on parallel file systems. Identifying these I/O performance bottlenecks and attributing root causes are critical steps toward devising optimization strategies. Several existing studies analyze I/O logs of a set of benchmarks or applications that were run with controlled behaviors. However, there is still a lack of general approach that systematically identifies I/O performance bottlenecks for applications running "in the wild" on production systems. In this study, we have developed an analysis approach of "zooming in" from platform-wide to application-wide to job-level I/O logs for identifying I/O bottlenecks in arbitrary scientific applications. We analyze the logs collected on a Cray XC40 system in production over a two-month period. This study results in several insights for application developers to use in optimizing I/O behavior.

Wang, Teng↗