An Approach for Energy Efficient Execution of Hybrid Parallel Programs

Hybrid programming model is becoming increasingly popular for HPC applications as it has the dual-advantage of exploiting inter-node distributed-memory scalability and intra-node shared-memory performance in a cluster system. One of the key challenges for energy efficient execution of hybrid programs is to determine time and energy efficient hardware configurations among a large system configuration space. Given a hybrid program with an execution time deadline and an energy budget, we propose a measurement-based analytical modelling approach to determine these system configurations. In contrast to current approaches, we model both inter and intra-node resource overlaps, memory contention among cores within a node and network contention across multiple nodes. The model invalidated against direct measurement using five representative HPC applications on Intel Xeon and ARM clusters having diverse time-energy performance. We show that a Pareto frontier consisting of optimal configurations exist for a hybrid program running on homogeneous clusters. To further optimize the Pareto frontier, we introduce a new metric, useful computation ratio (UCR) to quantify the degree of resource contentions and communication overheads in an execution. We discuss how UCR and Pareto-optimal configurations can be used in conjunction by system´s designers to gain further insights into system resource imbalances, and how application developers can further fine-tune their hybrid programs.