CI-NEW: Collaborative Research: Computer System Failure Data Repository to Enable Data-Driven Dependability

对于我们周围的许多计算机系统或在幕后工作以支持我们的个人和职业生活的许多计算机系统来说，可靠性已经成为必要的必要属性。计算机系统研究人员和从业者共同努力，建立和部署可靠的系统，取得了巨大的进步。然而，这项工作的绝大多数并不是基于真实的可公开获得的故障数据。不幸的是，对于任何最近的计算基础设施，只要足够大、足够多样化，并且具有关于基础设施和在其上运行的应用程序的足够信息，就不存在开放的故障数据存储库。该项目将解决这一紧迫需求。研究小组认识到，这一努力在许多层面上都具有挑战性。失败数据被认为是敏感的，通常只有在组织中一小部分人信任的眼睛之前才会公布。作为当前为期一年的规划拨款的一部分，该团队从广泛的受众那里收集了对存储库的特定需求，从普渡大学最大的集中管理计算集群收集了故障和使用数据，并执行了初步分析以揭示工作负载使用模式。这个全面项目的目标是从两所参与大学的各种计算基础设施以及NSF资助的几个大型网络基础设施项目中收集数据。该项目将收集、整理并在一个名为FRESCO的储存库中呈现大型计算系统的公共故障数据。数据集将包括静态信息、有关工作负载的动态信息以及计划内和计划外停机的故障信息。从生产机器收集数据将必须遵守几个实际约束--不更改工作负载、很少的性能干扰以及对操作系统的最小更改。此外，必须对数据进行消毒，以删除敏感信息，并对其进行处理，使其能够被广泛的研究人员解释。该项目还将提供分析工具来回答某些常见的问题，例如工作负载和故障之间的相关性以及使用一个库而不是另一个库对性能的影响，以及一个直观的图形前端，允许人们探索数据集并下载相关的数据集。数据和相关分析工具的广泛使用将使计算机系统研究人员具有前所未有的能力来进行数据驱动的研究，并为计算基础设施提供商提供分析驱动的能力，以运行更高效、可靠的基础设施。

Dependability has become a necessary requisite property for many of the computer systems that surround us or work behind the scenes to support our personal and professional lives. Heroic progress has been made by computer systems researchers and practitioners working together to build and deploy dependable systems. However, an overwhelming majority of this work is not based on real publicly available failure data. Unfortunately, an open failure data repository for any recent computing infrastructure that is large enough, diverse enough and with enough information about the infrastructure and the applications that run on them does not exist. This project will address this pressing need. The research team appreciates that this effort is challenging on many levels. Failure data are considered sensitive and are usually unveiled only before trusting eyes of a small subset of the people at the organization. As part of a current one-year planning grant, this team has collected specific requirements for the repository from a wide audience, collected failure and usage data from the largest centrally managed computing cluster at Purdue and performed preliminary analysis to reveal the workload usage patterns. The goal of this full-scale project is to collect data from a variety of computational infrastructure at the two participating universities, and from several of the NSF-funded large cyberinfrastructure projects.The project will collect, curate, and present public failure data of large-scale computing systems in a repository called FRESCO. The data sets will include static information, dynamic information about the workloads, and failure information for both planned and unplanned outages. The data collection from production machines will have to obey several practical constraints -- no changes to the workload, little performance perturbation, and minimal changes to the operating system. Further, the data have to be sanitized for removing sensitive information and processed to make it interpretable by a broad group of researchers. This project will also provide analysis tools to answer certain commonly occurring questions, such as the correlation between workload and failure and the performance implications of using one library over another, as well as an intuitive graphical front-end which will allow people to explore the data sets and download the relevant ones.Widespread use of the data and the associated analysis tools will give computer systems researchers an unprecedented ability to do data-driven research and offer computing infrastructure providers an analytic-driven capability to run more efficient reliable infrastructures.