A power management framework with simple DSL for automatic power-performance optimization on power-constrained HPC systems

Abstract

To design exascale HPC systems, power limitation is one of the most crucial and unavoidable issues; and it is also necessary to optimize the power-performance of user applications while keeping the power consumption of the HPC system below a given power budget. For this kind of power-performance optimization for HPC applications, it is indispensable to have enough information and good understanding about both the system specifications (what kind of hardware resources are included in the system, which component can be used as a “power-knob”, how to control the power-knob, etc.) and user applications (which part of the application is CPU-intensive, memory-intensive, and so on). Because this situation forces both the users and administrators of power-constrained HPC systems pay much effort and cost, it has been highly demanded to realize a simple framework to automate a power-performance optimization process, and to provide a simple user interface to the framework. To tackle these concerns, we propose and implement a versatile framework to help carry out power management and performance optimization on power-constrained HPC systems. In this framework, we also propose a simple DSL as an interface to utilize the framework. We believe this is a key to effectively utilize HPC systems under the limited power budget.