CSR: Small:Conductor: A Run-Time System for Exascale Computing

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One of the critical problems---if not the critical problem---inreaching the exascale computing goal by the end of the decade is thepower problem. Exascale systems have a target power constraint of 20megawatts even though today's petascale systems---which haveperformance at least two orders of magnitude below prospectiveexascale systems---generally consume around 5 megawatts. Hardwareimprovements alone will not bridge this gap.The PI is developing a run-time system called Conductor to address thepower issue. The overall goal of Conductor is to produce near-optimalapplication performance under a prescribed power bound. Conductorcarries this out by allocating power both between and within nodes.First, the PI is designing and implementing a new technique calledpower scheduling, which addresses the inter-node case. The secondpart of Conductor addresses the intra-node case with power gating,which allows powering off of individual components in a morefine-grain manner than is generally available in architectures today.Finally, the PI is investigating techniques to allow users to assistConductor, through annotations, in achieving high performance in caseswhere power scheduling and power gating alone are not sufficient.The impact of the research described in this proposal is significant.Conductor is essential to achieving exascale performance on nontrivialapplications, and it will help push towards the exascale goal.Achieving exascale performance is an important national priority andwill impact many application domains. The PI is also integrating theresearch ideas into both undergraduate and graduate parallel anddistributed computing courses.