The First Annual Workshop for HPC PowerStack

A Community-Driven Effort to Enable System-wide Power Efficiency

Thursday, June 20, 2019
9AM -- 6PM
Frankfurt Marriott Hotel, Room Gold 2

Motivation

Although there exist several standalone efforts that attempt to tackle exascale power challenges, the majority of the state-of-the-art implemented techniques have been designed to meet site-specific needs or optimization goals. Community specifications such as the PowerAPI and Redfish provide high-level power management interfaces for accessing power knobs. However, these stop short of defining which software components should actually be involved, and how should they interoperate with each other in a cohesive and coordinated stack. We believe coordination among these components is critical for avoiding underutilization of system Watts and FLOPS.

The above realization led to the formation of the HPC PowerStack Community in 2016. The charter of this community has been to:

• Identify the key software actors needed in a system power stack: job-schedulers, application-level runtime, hardware knobs;
• Identify their respective privileges, roles, and responsibilities;
• Design communication protocols for bidirectional control and feedback signals among them to enable scalable coordination at different granularities;
• Design mechanisms for actors to access privileged hardware controls and monitors to ensure stable closed-loop optimization;
• Study and combine existing ad-hoc engineering and development prototypes and build a community that actively participates in well-engineered, scalable and deployable solutions.

This workshop will disseminate key insights that have been acquired so far within this community, provide status updates on the first prototype, invite audience feedback on current directions, and brainstorm solutions to open questions. We will also issue a call-to-action to join the collaboration to build an even stronger community.

Proposed Agenda

Other PowerStack Events at ISC19

Back