Quantitative modeling of power performance tradeoffs on extreme scale systems

• A colored Petri net was developed for tradeoff analysis of power and performance.
• Trace based validation demonstrated that the model is highly accurate and scalable.
• The model was used to analyze different power capping methods on petascale systems.

As high performance computing (HPC) continues to grow in scale and complexity, energy becomes a critical constraint in the race to exascale computing. The days of “performance at all cost” are coming to an end. While performance is still a major objective, future HPC will have to deliver desired performance under the energy constraint. Among various power management methods, power capping is a widely used approach. Unfortunately, the impact of power capping on system performance, user jobs, and power-performance efficiency are not well studied due to many interfering factors imposed by system workload and configurations. To fully understand power management in extreme scale systems with a fixed power budget, we introduce a power-performance modeling tool named PuPPET (Power Performance PETri net). Unlike the traditional performance modeling approaches such as analytical methods or trace-based simulators, we explore a new approach–colored Petri nets–for the design of PuPPET. PuPPET is fast and extensible for navigating through different configurations. More importantly, it can scale to hundreds of thousands of processor cores and at the same time provide high levels of modeling accuracy. We validate PuPPET by using system traces (i.e., workload log and power data) collected from the production 48-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory. Our trace-based validation demonstrates that PuPPET is capable of modeling the dynamic execution of parallel jobs on the machine by providing an accurate approximation of energy consumption. In addition, we present two case studies of using PuPPET to study power-performance tradeoffs on petascale systems.