The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Authors: Ryan Grant (Sandia National Laboratories), Steve Martin (Cray Inc), Barry Rountree (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Masaaki Kondo (University of Tokyo), Todd Rosedahl (IBM Corporation), Torsten Wilde (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
Abstract: The HPC community faces considerable constraints on power and energy of HPC installations. A standardized, vendor-neutral API for power measurement and control is needed for portable solutions to these issues at the various layers of the software stack. In this BoF, we discuss the Power API; a community standardized API for measurement and control of power/energy. The BoF will introduce newcomers to these efforts and provide clear differentiation with other ongoing projects. An interactive panel discussion with experts from involved organizations will facilitate discussions on the Power API with ample time for audience questions and comments.
Long Description: Among the universal challenges that the HPC community faces going forward are constraints on power and energy of HPC installations. However, differences in vendor proprietary interfaces to power measurement and control mechanisms result in duplication of effort and fragment the user base, rendering solutions non-portable between different systems. Moreover, different vendors may be responsible for different components of the same system, including hardware, OS, application-level runtime systems, schedulers, and RAS systems. The HPC community has been developing a standardized, vendor-neutral API, the HPC Power API in response to this need.
The Power API for HPC is an effort to standardize power measurement and control to address the challenges of energy efficiency and power constraints through a portable API. The API is a community effort with participants from industry, national laboratories, government, and academia.
The Power API has now published its first official community version and expects to publish another version before SC19. This makes SC19 an excellent venue for wider community discussions and feedback on progress made with the Power API.
Several previous BOFs at SC14, SC15, SC17 and SC18 provided a public forum for discussion of progress on implementations and integration of Power API. Those integrations have now taken place and the Power API is tackling new challenges in areas of interoperability between overall system components in the software stack.
While other SC BOFs have be held on power-aware and energy efficient computing, this BOF is the only one focused completely on standardized power/energy monitoring and control APIs. Attendance in previous years has been strong with ~70 people at SC17 and SC18. Since the APIs range from hardware and operating systems to resource managers and administrators to applications, the discussion draws a diverse cross-section of SC attendees. Active work on Power API is geographically diverse: in North America, Intel, HPE, Cray, Adaptive, AMD, IBM, and national labs. In Europe, Bull-Atos and university partners. In Asia, Japan has adopted the Power API via Fujitsu. Due to its tradition, scope, and scale, SC is the best venue to bring together the world-wide partners in the Standardizing power/energy monitoring and control APIs and hopefully attract new partners to the effort. Power API is also collaborating with the PowerStack effort as they begin their efforts to integrate different parts of existing power management software from an engineering perspective. We hope that the PowerStack effort will have begun regular technical working group meetings by that time so that technical discussions can be facilitated between the two groups.
The outcome of the BOF will be a written report summarizing the results of a survey of the attendees, including their responses to the following questions:
-- What new implementations have been deployed this past year? What are the targeted architectures? (We have new ARM deployments already).
-- How are our users working with the new elements of the Power API? Are there
any missing gaps that have not been brought up to the specifications committee?
Attendees will be encouraged to complete a survey at the event.
URL: https://eehpcwg.llnl.gov/conf_sc19.html
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