Title
Characterizing Supercomputer Traffic Networks Through Link-Level Analysis
Abstract
We present techniques for characterizing bandwidth and congestion characteristics of supercomputer High-Speed Networks (HSN). By utilizing a link-level perspective, we gain generality over analyses which are tied to specific topologies. We illustrate these techniques using five months of a Blue Waters production dataset consisting of network utilization and congestion counters. We find that: i) execution time of the communication-heavy applications is highly correlated to network stalls observed in the network topology and increase in application runtime can be as high as 1.7x with nominal increase in stalls, ii) heterogeneity in the available link bandwidth in the network can lead to backpressure and congestion even when the network is not underprovisioned, and (iii) links connected to I/O nodes are no more likely to observe congestion during operational hours than any other link in the system.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/CLUSTER.2018.00072
2018 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER)
Keywords
Field
DocType
network congestion,congestion characterization,network congestion visualization
Supercomputer,Computer science,Link level,Network topology,Bandwidth (signal processing),Execution time,Network congestion,Benchmark (computing),Blue Waters,Distributed computing
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1552-5244
978-1-5386-8320-0
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
8
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Saurabh Jha130.72
Jim M. Brandt27010.20
Ann C. Gentile3377.91
Zbigniew Kalbarczyk41896159.48
Ravishankar K. Iyer53489504.32