Highly Interactive, Steered Scientific Workflows on HPC Systems: Optimizing Design Solutions

John R. Ossyra, Ada Sedova, Matthew B. Baker, Jeremy C. Smith

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Scientific workflows are becoming increasingly important in high performance computing (HPC) settings, as the feasibility and appeal of many simultaneous heterogeneous tasks increases with increasing hardware capabilities. Currently no HPC-based workflow platform supports a dynamically adaptable workflow with interactive steering and analysis at run-time. Furthermore, for most workflow programs, compute resources are fixed for a given instance, resulting in a possible waste of expensive allocation resources when tasks are spawned and killed. Here we describe the design and testing of a run-time-interactive, adaptable, steered workflow tool capable of executing thousands of parallel tasks without an MPI programming model, using a database management system to facilitate task management through multiple live connections. We find that on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility pre-exascale Summit supercomputer it is possible to launch and interactively steer workflows with thousands of simultaneous tasks with negligible latency. For the case of particle simulation and analysis tasks that run for minutes to hours, this paradigm offers the prospect of a robust and efficient means to perform simulation-space exploration with on-the-fly analysis and adaptation.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationHigh Performance Computing - ISC High Performance 2019 International Workshops, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsMichèle Weiland, Guido Juckeland, Sadaf Alam, Heike Jagode
PublisherSpringer
Pages514-527
Number of pages14
ISBN (Print)9783030343552
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019
Event34th International Conference on High Performance Computing, ISC High Performance 2019 - Frankfurt, Germany
Duration: Jun 16 2019Jun 20 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11887 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference34th International Conference on High Performance Computing, ISC High Performance 2019
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityFrankfurt
Period06/16/1906/20/19

Funding

An award of computer time was provided by the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under Contract DE-AC05-00OR227525. JCS acknowledges ORNL LDRD funds. The authors would like to thank Oscar Hernandez, Frank Noé and group, Cecilia Clementi and group, and Shantenu Jha and group, for valuable insight and discussions.

FundersFunder number
ORNL LDRD
Office of ScienceDE-AC05-00OR227525

    Keywords

    • Adaptable workflows
    • External steering
    • High performance computing
    • Scientific workflows

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