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30 \title{Dynamic Frequency Scaling for Energy Consumption
31 Reduction in Synchronous Distributed Applications}
42 University of Franche-Comté\\
43 IUT de Belfort-Montbéliard,
44 19 avenue du Maréchal Juin, BP 527, 90016 Belfort cedex, France\\
45 % Telephone: \mbox{+33 3 84 58 77 86}, % Raphaël
46 % Fax: \mbox{+33 3 84 58 77 81}\\ % Dept Info
47 Email: \email{{jean-claude.charr,raphael.couturier,ahmed.fanfakh_badri_muslim,arnaud.giersch}@univ-fcomte.fr}
54 Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) can be applied to modern CPUs. This
55 technique is usually used to reduce the energy consumed by a CPU while
56 computing. Thus, decreasing the frequency
57 reduces the power consumed by the CPU. However, it can also significantly
58 affect the performance of the executed program if it is compute bound and if a
59 low CPU frequency is selected. Therefore, the chosen scaling factor must
60 give the best possible trade-off between energy reduction and performance.
62 In this paper we present an algorithm that predicts the energy consumed with
63 each frequency gear and selects the one that gives the best ratio between
64 energy consumption reduction and performance. This algorithm works online
65 without training or profiling and has a very small overhead. It also takes
66 into account synchronous communications between the nodes that are executing
67 the distributed algorithm. The algorithm has been evaluated over the SimGrid
68 simulator while being applied to the NAS parallel benchmark programs. The
69 results of the experiments show that it outperforms other existing scaling
70 factor selection algorithms.
73 \section{Introduction}
76 The need and demand for more computing power have been increasing since the
77 birth of the first computing unit and it is not expected to slow down in the
78 coming years. To satisfy this demand, researchers and supercomputers
79 constructors have been regularly increasing the number of computing cores and
80 processors in supercomputers (for example in November 2013, according to the
81 TOP500 list~\cite{43}, the Tianhe-2 was the fastest supercomputer. It has more
82 than 3 million of cores and delivers more than \np[Tflop/s]{33} while consuming
83 \np[kW]{17808}). This large increase in number of computing cores has led to
84 large energy consumption by these architectures. Moreover, the price of energy
85 is expected to continue its ascent according to the demand. For all these
86 reasons energy reduction has become an important topic in the high performance
87 computing field. To tackle this problem, many researchers use DVFS (Dynamic
88 Voltage Frequency Scaling) operations which reduce dynamically the frequency and
89 voltage of cores and thus their energy consumption. Indeed, modern CPUs offer a
90 set of acceptable frequencies which are usually called gears, and the user or
91 the operating system can modify the frequency of the processor according to its
92 needs. However, DVFS also degrades the performance of computation. Therefore
93 researchers try to reduce the frequency to the minimum when processors are idle
94 (waiting for data from other processors or communicating with other processors).
95 Moreover, depending on their objectives, they use heuristics to find the best
96 scaling factor during the computation. If they aim for performance they choose
97 the best scaling factor that reduces the consumed energy while affecting as
98 little as possible the performance. On the other hand, if they aim for energy
99 reduction, the chosen scaling factor must produce the most energy efficient
100 execution without considering the degradation of the performance. It is
101 important to notice that lowering the frequency to the minimum value does not always
102 give the most energy efficient execution due to energy leakage. The best
103 scaling factor might be chosen during execution (online) or during a
104 pre-execution phase. In this paper, we present an algorithm that selects a
105 frequency scaling factor that simultaneously takes into consideration the energy
106 consumption by the CPU and the performance of the application. The main
107 objective of HPC systems is to execute as fast as possible the application.
108 Therefore, our algorithm selects the scaling factor online with very small
109 overhead. The proposed algorithm takes into account the communication times of
110 the MPI program to choose the scaling factor. This algorithm has the ability to
111 predict both energy consumption and execution time over all available scaling
112 factors. The prediction achieved depends on some computing time information,
113 gathered at the beginning of the runtime. We apply this algorithm to the NAS parallel benchmarks (NPB v3.3)~\cite{44}. Our experiments are executed using the simulator
114 SimGrid/SMPI v3.10~\cite{Casanova:2008:SGF:1397760.1398183} over an homogeneous
115 distributed memory architecture. Furthermore, we compare the proposed algorithm
116 with Rauber and Rünger methods~\cite{3}. The comparison's results show that our
117 algorithm gives better energy-time trade-off.
119 This paper is organized as follows: Section~\ref{sec.relwork} presents some
120 related works from other authors. Section~\ref{sec.exe} presents an energy
121 model for homogeneous platforms. Section~\ref{sec.mpip} describes how the
122 performance of MPI programs can be predicted. Section~\ref{sec.compet} presents
123 the energy-performance objective function that maximizes the reduction of energy
124 consumption while minimizing the degradation of the program's performance.
125 Section~\ref{sec.optim} details the proposed energy-performance algorithm.
126 Section~\ref{sec.expe} verifies the accuracy of the performance prediction model
127 and presents the results of the proposed algorithm. It also shows the
128 comparison results between our method and other existing methods. Finally, we
129 conclude in Section~\ref{sec.concl} with a summary and some future works.
131 \section{Related works}
135 In this section, some heuristics to compute the scaling factor are presented and
136 classified into two categories: offline and online methods.
138 \subsection{Offline scaling factor selection methods}
140 The offline scaling factor selection methods are executed before the runtime of
141 the program. They return static scaling factor values to the processors
142 participating in the execution of the parallel program. On the one hand, the
143 scaling factor values could be computed based on information retrieved by
144 analyzing the code of the program and the computing system that will execute it.
145 In~\cite{40}, Azevedo et al. detect during compilation the dependency points
146 between tasks in a multi-task program. This information is then used to lower
147 the frequency of some processors in order to eliminate slack times. A slack
148 time is the period of time during which a processor that has already finished
149 its computation, has to wait for a set of processors to finish their
150 computations and send their results to the waiting processor in order to
151 continue its task that is dependent on the results of computations being
152 executed on other processors. Freeh et al. showed in~\cite{17} that the
153 communication times of MPI programs do not change when the frequency is scaled
154 down. On the other hand, some offline scaling factor selection methods use the
155 information gathered from previous full or partial executions of the program. The whole program or, a
156 part of it, is usually executed over all the available frequency
157 gears and the execution time and the energy consumed with each frequency
158 gear are measured. Then a heuristic or an exact method uses the retrieved
159 information to compute the values of the scaling factor for the processors.
160 In~\cite{8} , Rountree et al. use a linear programming algorithm, while in~\cite{34}, Cochran et
161 al. use a multi-logistic regression algorithm for the same goal. The main
162 drawback of these methods is that they all require executing the
163 whole program or, a part of it, on all frequency gears for each new instance of the same program.
165 \subsection{Online scaling factor selection methods}
167 The online scaling factor selection methods are executed during the runtime of
168 the program. They are usually integrated into iterative programs where the same
169 block of instructions is executed many times. During the first few iterations,
170 a lot of information is measured such as the execution time, the energy consumed
171 using a multimeter, the slack times, \dots{} Then a method will exploit these
172 measurements to compute the scaling factor values for each processor. This
173 operation, measurements and computing new scaling factor, can be repeated as
174 much as needed if the iterations are not regular. Peraza, Yu-Liang et
175 al.~\cite{2,31} used varied heuristics to select the appropriate scaling
176 factor values to eliminate the slack times during runtime. However, as seen
177 in~\cite{19}, machine learning method takes a lot of time to converge
178 when the number of available gears is big. To reduce the impact of slack times,
179 in~\cite{1}, Lim et al. developed an algorithm that detects the communication
180 sections and changes the frequency during these sections only. This approach
181 might change the frequency of each processor many times per iteration if an
182 iteration contains more than one communication section. In~\cite{3}, Rauber and
183 Rünger used an analytical model that can predict the consumed energy for every frequency gear after measuring the consumed energy. They
184 maintain the performance as mush as possible by setting the highest frequency gear to the slowest task.
186 The primary contribution of
187 our paper is to present a new online scaling factor selection method which has the
188 following characteristics:\\
189 1) It is based on Rauber and Rünger analytical model to predict the energy
190 consumption of the application with different frequency gears.
191 2) It selects the frequency scaling factor for simultaneously optimizing
192 energy reduction and maintaining performance.
193 3) It is well adapted to distributed architectures because it takes into
194 account the communication time.
195 4) It is well adapted to distributed applications with imbalanced tasks.
196 5) It has a very small overhead when compared to other methods
197 (e.g.,~\cite{19}) and does not require profiling or training as
201 % \JC{The whole subsection ``Parallel Tasks Execution on Homogeneous Platform'',
202 % can be deleted if we need space, we can just say we are interested in this
203 % paper in homogeneous clusters}
206 \section{Energy model for homogeneous platform}
208 Many researchers~\cite{9,3,15,26} divide the power consumed by a processor into
209 two power metrics: the static and the dynamic power. While the first one is
210 consumed as long as the computing unit is on, the latter is only consumed during
211 computation times. The dynamic power $P_{dyn}$ is related to the switching
212 activity $\alpha$, load capacitance $C_L$, the supply voltage $V$ and
213 operational frequency $f$, as shown in EQ~(\ref{eq:pd}).
216 P_\textit{dyn} = \alpha \cdot C_L \cdot V^2 \cdot f
218 The static power $P_{static}$ captures the leakage power as follows:
221 P_\textit{static} = V \cdot N_{trans} \cdot K_{design} \cdot I_{leak}
223 where V is the supply voltage, $N_{trans}$ is the number of transistors,
224 $K_{design}$ is a design dependent parameter and $I_{leak}$ is a
225 technology-dependent parameter. The energy consumed by an individual processor
226 to execute a given program can be computed as:
229 E_\textit{ind} = P_\textit{dyn} \cdot T_{Comp} + P_\textit{static} \cdot T
231 where $T$ is the execution time of the program, $T_{Comp}$ is the computation
232 time and $T_{Comp} \leq T$. $T_{Comp}$ may be equal to $T$ if there is no
233 communication, no slack time and no synchronization.
235 DVFS is a process that is allowed in modern processors to reduce the dynamic
236 power by scaling down the voltage and frequency. Its main objective is to
237 reduce the overall energy consumption~\cite{37}. The operational frequency $f$
238 depends linearly on the supply voltage $V$, i.e., $V = \beta \cdot f$ with some
239 constant $\beta$. This equation is used to study the change of the dynamic
240 voltage with respect to various frequency values in~\cite{3}. The reduction
241 process of the frequency can be expressed by the scaling factor $S$ which is the
242 ratio between the maximum and the new frequency as in EQ~(\ref{eq:s}).
245 S = \frac{F_\textit{max}}{F_\textit{new}}
247 The value of the scaling factor $S$ is greater than 1 when changing the
248 frequency of the CPU to any new frequency value~(\emph{P-state}) in the
249 governor. This factor reduces quadratically
250 the dynamic power which may cause degradation in performance and thus, the
251 increase of the static energy because the execution time is increased~\cite{36}.
252 If the tasks are sorted according to their execution times before scaling in a
253 descending order, the total energy consumption model for a parallel homogeneous
254 platform, as presented by Rauber and Rünger~\cite{3}, can be written as a
255 function of the scaling factor $S$, as in EQ~(\ref{eq:energy}).
259 E = P_\textit{dyn} \cdot S_1^{-2} \cdot
260 \left( T_1 + \sum_{i=2}^{N} \frac{T_i^3}{T_1^2} \right) +
261 P_\textit{static} \cdot T_1 \cdot S_1 \cdot N
264 where $N$ is the number of parallel nodes, $T_i$ for $i=1,\dots,N$ are
265 the execution times and scaling factors of the sorted tasks. Therefore, $T1$ is
266 the time of the slowest task, and $S_1$ its scaling factor which should be the
267 highest because they are proportional to the time values $T_i$. The scaling
268 factors are computed as in EQ~(\ref{eq:si}).
271 S_i = S \cdot \frac{T_1}{T_i}
272 = \frac{F_\textit{max}}{F_\textit{new}} \cdot \frac{T_1}{T_i}
274 In this paper we use Rauber and Rünger's energy model, EQ~(\ref{eq:energy}), because it can be applied to homogeneous clusters if the communication time is taken in consideration. Moreover, we compare our algorithm with Rauber and Rünger's scaling factor selection
275 method which uses the same energy model. In their method, the optimal scaling factor is
276 computed by minimizing the derivation of EQ~(\ref{eq:energy}) which produces
281 S_\textit{opt} = \sqrt[3]{\frac{2}{N} \cdot \frac{P_\textit{dyn}}{P_\textit{static}} \cdot
282 \left( 1 + \sum_{i=2}^{N} \frac{T_i^3}{T_1^3} \right) }
286 \section{Performance evaluation of MPI programs}
289 The performance (execution time) of parallel synchronous MPI applications depends
290 on the time of the slowest task. If there is no
291 communication and the application is not data bounded, the execution time of a
292 parallel program is linearly proportional to the operational frequency and any
293 DVFS operation for energy reduction increases the execution time of the parallel
294 program. Therefore, the scaling factor $S$ is linearly proportional to the
295 execution time. However, in most MPI applications the processes exchange
296 data. During these communications the processors involved remain idle until the
297 communications are finished. For that reason, any change in the frequency has no
298 impact on the time of communication~\cite{17}. The communication time for a
299 task is the summation of periods of time that begin with an MPI call for sending
300 or receiving a message till the message is synchronously sent or received. To
301 be able to predict the execution time of MPI program, the communication time and
302 the computation time for the slowest task must be measured before scaling. These
303 times are used to predict the execution time for any MPI program as a function
304 of the new scaling factor as in EQ~(\ref{eq:tnew}).
307 \textit T_\textit{new} = T_\textit{Max Comp Old} \cdot S + T_{\textit{Max Comm Old}}
309 In this paper, this prediction method is used to select the best scaling factor
310 for each processor as presented in the next section.
312 \section{Performance and energy reduction trade-off}
315 This section presents our approach for choosing the optimal scaling factor.
316 This factor gives maximum energy reduction while taking into account the execution
317 times for both computation and communication. The relation between the performance
318 and the energy is nonlinear and complex. Thus, unlike the relation between the performance and the scaling factor, the relation of energy with the scaling factor is nonlinear, for more details refer to~\cite{17}. Moreover, they are not measured using the same metric. To
319 solve this problem, we normalize the energy by calculating the ratio between
320 the consumed energy with scaled frequency and the consumed energy without scaled
324 E_\textit{Norm} = \frac{ E_\textit{Reduced}}{E_\textit{Original}} \\
325 {} = \frac{P_\textit{dyn} \cdot S_1^{-2} \cdot
326 \left( T_1 + \sum_{i=2}^{N}\frac{T_i^3}{T_1^2}\right) +
327 P_\textit{static} \cdot T_1 \cdot S_1 \cdot N }{
328 P_\textit{dyn} \cdot \left(T_1+\sum_{i=2}^{N}\frac{T_i^3}{T_1^2}\right) +
329 P_\textit{static} \cdot T_1 \cdot N }
331 In the same way we can normalize the performance as follows:
334 P_\textit{Norm} = \frac{T_\textit{New}}{T_\textit{Old}}
335 = \frac{T_\textit{Max Comp Old} \cdot S +
336 T_\textit{Max Comm Old}}{T_\textit{Max Comp Old} +
337 T_\textit{Max Comm Old}}
339 The second problem is that the optimization operation for both energy and
340 performance is not in the same direction. In other words, the normalized energy
341 and the performance curves are not at the same direction see
342 Figure~(\ref{fig:r2}). While the main goal is to optimize the energy and
343 performance in the same time. According to the equations~(\ref{eq:enorm})
344 and~(\ref{eq:pnorm}), the scaling factor $S$ reduce both the energy and the
345 performance simultaneously. But the main objective is to produce maximum energy
346 reduction with minimum performance reduction. Many researchers used different
347 strategies to solve this nonlinear problem for example see~\cite{19,42}, their
348 methods add big overheads to the algorithm to select the suitable frequency.
349 In this paper we present a method to find the optimal scaling factor $S$ to optimize both energy and performance simultaneously without adding a big
350 overhead. Our solution for this problem is to make the optimization process
351 for energy and performance follow the same direction. Therefore, we inverse the equation of the normalized
352 performance as follows:
355 P^{-1}_\textit{Norm} = \frac{ T_\textit{Old}}{ T_\textit{New}}
356 = \frac{T_\textit{Max Comp Old} +
357 T_\textit{Max Comm Old}}{T_\textit{Max Comp Old} \cdot S +
358 T_\textit{Max Comm Old}}
362 \subfloat[Converted relation.]{%
363 \includegraphics[width=.5\linewidth]{fig/file}\label{fig:r1}}%
364 \subfloat[Real relation.]{%
365 \includegraphics[width=.5\linewidth]{fig/file3}\label{fig:r2}}
367 \caption{The energy and performance relation}
369 Then, we can model our objective function as finding the maximum distance
370 between the energy curve EQ~(\ref{eq:enorm}) and the inverse of performance
371 curve EQ~(\ref{eq:pnorm_en}) over all available scaling factors. This
372 represents the minimum energy consumption with minimum execution time (better
373 performance) at the same time, see Figure~(\ref{fig:r1}). Then our objective
374 function has the following form:
377 \textit{Max Dist} = \max_{j=1,2,\dots,F}
378 (\overbrace{P^{-1}_\textit{Norm}(S_j)}^{\text{Maximize}} -
379 \overbrace{E_\textit{Norm}(S_j)}^{\text{Minimize}} )
381 where $F$ is the number of available frequencies. Then we can select the optimal
382 scaling factor that satisfies EQ~(\ref{eq:max}). Our objective function can
383 work with any energy model or static power values stored in a data file.
384 Moreover, this function works in optimal way when the energy curve has a convex
385 form over the available frequency scaling factors as shown in~\cite{15,3,19}.
387 \section{Optimal scaling factor for performance and energy}
390 Algorithm on Figure~\ref{EPSA} computes the optimal scaling factor according to
391 the objective function described above.
393 \begin{algorithmic}[1]
395 \State Initialize the variable $Dist=0$
396 \State Set dynamic and static power values.
397 \State Set $P_{states}$ to the number of available frequencies.
398 \State Set the variable $F_{new}$ to max. frequency, $F_{new} = F_{max} $
399 \State Set the variable $F_{diff}$ to the difference between two successive
401 \For {$j:=1$ to $P_{states} $}
402 \State $F_{new}=F_{new} - F_{diff} $
403 \State $S = \frac{F_\textit{max}}{F_\textit{new}}$
404 \State $S_i = S \cdot \frac{T_1}{T_i}
405 = \frac{F_\textit{max}}{F_\textit{new}} \cdot \frac{T_1}{T_i}$
407 \State $E_\textit{Norm} =
408 \frac{P_\textit{dyn} \cdot S_1^{-2} \cdot
409 \left( T_1 + \sum_{i=2}^{N}\frac{T_i^3}{T_1^2}\right) +
410 P_\textit{static} \cdot T_1 \cdot S_1 \cdot N }{
412 \left(T_1+\sum_{i=2}^{N}\frac{T_i^3}{T_1^2}\right) +
413 P_\textit{static} \cdot T_1 \cdot N }$
414 \State $P_{NormInv}=T_{old}/T_{new}$
415 \If{$(P_{NormInv}-E_{Norm} > Dist)$}
417 \State $Dist = P_{NormInv} - E_{Norm}$
420 \State Return $S_{opt}$
422 \caption{Scaling factor selection algorithm}
426 The proposed algorithm works online during the execution time of the MPI
427 program. It selects the optimal scaling factor after gathering the computation
428 and communication times from the program after one iteration. Then the program
429 changes the new frequencies of the CPUs according to the computed scaling
430 factors. In our experiments over a homogeneous cluster described in
431 section~\ref{sec.expe}, this algorithm has a small execution time. It takes
432 \np[$\mu$s]{1.52} on average for 4 nodes and \np[$\mu$s]{6.65} on average for 32
433 nodes. The algorithm complexity is $O(F\cdot N)$, where $F$ is the number of
434 available frequencies and $N$ is the number of computing nodes. The algorithm
435 is called just once during the execution of the program. The DVFS
436 algorithm~(Fig.~\ref{dvfs}) shows where and when the algorithm is called in the
439 % \caption{Platform file parameters}
442 % \begin{tabular}{|*{7}{l|}}
444 % Max & Min & Backbone & Backbone & Link & Link & Sharing \\
445 % Freq. & Freq. & Bandwidth & Latency & Bandwidth & Latency & Policy \\
447 % \np{2.5} & \np{800} & \np[GBps]{2.25} & \np[$\mu$s]{0.5} & \np[GBps]{1} & \np[$\mu$s]{50} & Full \\
448 % GHz & MHz & & & & & Duplex \\
451 % \label{table:platform}
455 \begin{algorithmic}[1]
457 \For {$k:=1$ to \textit{some iterations}}
458 \State Computations section.
459 \State Communications section.
461 \State Gather all times of computation and\newline\hspace*{3em}%
462 communication from each node.
463 \State Call algorithm from Figure~\ref{EPSA} with these times.
464 \State Compute the new frequency from the\newline\hspace*{3em}%
465 returned optimal scaling factor.
466 \State Set the new frequency to the CPU.
470 \caption{DVFS algorithm}
473 After obtaining the optimal scaling factor, the program calculates the new
474 frequency $F_i$ for each task proportionally to its time value $T_i$. By
475 substitution of EQ~(\ref{eq:s}) in EQ~(\ref{eq:si}), we can calculate the new
476 frequency $F_i$ as follows:
479 F_i = \frac{F_\textit{max} \cdot T_i}{S_\textit{optimal} \cdot T_\textit{max}}
481 According to this equation all the nodes may have the same frequency value if
482 they have balanced workloads, otherwise, they take different frequencies when
483 having imbalanced workloads. Thus, EQ~(\ref{eq:fi}) adapts the frequency of the
484 CPU to the nodes' workloads to maintain the performance of the program.
486 \section{Experimental results}
488 Our experiments are executed on the simulator SimGrid/SMPI v3.10. We configure
489 the simulator to use a homogeneous cluster with one core per node.
490 %The detailed characteristics of our platform file are shown in Table~(\ref{table:platform}).
491 Each node in the cluster has 18 frequency values
492 from \np[GHz]{2.5} to \np[MHz]{800} with \np[MHz]{100} difference between each
493 two successive frequencies. The nodes are connected via an ethernet network with 1Gbit/s bandwidth.
495 \subsection{Performance prediction verification}
497 In this section we evaluate the precision of our performance prediction method
498 based on EQ~(\ref{eq:tnew}) by applying it to the NAS benchmarks. The NAS programs
499 are executed with the class B option to compare the real execution time with
500 the predicted execution time. Each program runs offline with all available
501 scaling factors on 8 or 9 nodes (depending on the benchmark) to produce real
502 execution time values. These scaling factors are computed by dividing the
503 maximum frequency by the new one see EQ~(\ref{eq:s}).
506 \includegraphics[width=.5\linewidth]{fig/cg_per}\hfill%
507 % \includegraphics[width=.5\linewidth]{fig/mg_pre}\hfill%
508 % \includegraphics[width=.5\linewidth]{fig/bt_pre}\qquad%
509 \includegraphics[width=.5\linewidth]{fig/lu_pre}\hfill%
510 \caption{Comparing predicted to real execution times}
513 %see Figure~\ref{fig:pred}
514 In our cluster there are 18 available frequency states for each processor. This
515 leads to 18 run states for each program. We use seven MPI programs of the NAS
516 parallel benchmarks: CG, MG, EP, FT, BT, LU and SP. Figure~(\ref{fig:pred})
517 presents plots of the real execution times and the simulated ones. The maximum
518 normalized error between these two execution times varies between \np{0.0073} to
519 \np{0.031} dependent on the executed benchmark. The smallest prediction error
520 was for CG and the worst one was for LU.
522 \subsection{The experimental results for the scaling algorithm }
523 The proposed algorithm was applied to seven MPI programs of the NAS benchmarks
524 (EP, CG, MG, FT, BT, LU and SP) which were run with three classes (A, B and C).
525 For each instance the benchmarks were executed on a number of processors
526 proportional to the size of the class. Each class represents the problem size
527 ascending from class A to C. Additionally, depending on some speed up
528 points for each class we run the classes A, B and C on 4, 8 or 9 and 16 nodes
529 respectively. Depending on EQ~(\ref{eq:energy}), we measure the energy
530 consumption for all the NAS MPI programs while assuming that the dynamic power with
531 the highest frequency is equal to \np[W]{20} and the power static is equal to
532 \np[W]{4} for all experiments. These power values were also used by Rauber and
533 Rünger in~\cite{3}. The results showed that the algorithm selected different
534 scaling factors for each program depending on the communication features of the
535 program as in the plots~(\ref{fig:nas}). These plots illustrate that there are
536 different distances between the normalized energy and the normalized inverted
537 performance curves, because there are different communication features for each
538 benchmark. When there are little or no communications, the inverted
539 performance curve is very close to the energy curve. Then the distance between
540 the two curves is very small. This leads to small energy savings. The opposite
541 happens when there are a lot of communication, the distance between the two
542 curves is big. This leads to more energy savings (e.g. CG and FT), see
543 Table~(\ref{table:compareC}). All discovered frequency scaling factors
544 optimize both the energy and the performance simultaneously for all NAS
545 benchmarks. In Table~(\ref{table:compareC}), we record all optimal
546 scaling factors results for each benchmark running class C. These scaling
547 factors give the maximum energy saving percentage and the minimum performance
548 degradation percentage at the same time from all available scaling factors.
551 \includegraphics[width=.33\linewidth]{fig/ep}\hfill%
552 \includegraphics[width=.33\linewidth]{fig/cg}\hfill%
553 % \includegraphics[width=.328\linewidth]{fig/sp}
554 % \includegraphics[width=.328\linewidth]{fig/lu}\hfill%
555 \includegraphics[width=.33\linewidth]{fig/bt}
556 % \includegraphics[width=.328\linewidth]{fig/ft}
557 \caption{Optimal scaling factors for the predicted energy and performance of NAS benchmarks}
561 As shown in Table~(\ref{table:compareC}), when the optimal scaling
562 factor has a big value we can gain more energy savings as in CG and
563 FT benchmarks. The opposite happens when the optimal scaling factor has a
564 small value as in BT and EP benchmarks. Our algorithm selects a big scaling
565 factor value when the communication and the other slacks times are big and smaller
566 ones in opposite cases. In EP there are no communication inside the iterations.
567 This leads our algorithm to select smaller scaling factor values (inducing smaller energy
570 \subsection{Results comparison}
572 In this section, we compare our scaling factor selection method with Rauber and
573 Rünger methods~\cite{3}. They had two scenarios, the first is to reduce energy
574 to the optimal level without considering the performance as in
575 EQ~(\ref{eq:sopt}). We refer to this scenario as $R_{E}$. The second scenario
576 is similar to the first except setting the slower task to the maximum frequency
577 (when the scale $S=1$) to keep the performance from degradation as mush as
578 possible. We refer to this scenario as $R_{E-P}$. While we refer to our
579 algorithm as EPSA (Energy to Performance Scaling Algorithm). The comparison is
580 made in Table ~\ref{table:compareC}. This table shows the results of our method and
581 Rauber and Rünger scenarios for all the NAS benchmarks programs for class C.
584 \caption{Comparing results for the NAS class C}
587 \begin{tabular}{|l|l|*{4}{r|}}
589 Method & Program & Factor & Energy & Performance & Energy-Perf. \\
590 Name & Name & Value & Saving \% & Degradation \% & Distance \\
592 % \rowcolor[gray]{0.85}
593 $EPSA$ & CG & 1.56 & 39.23 & 14.88 & 24.35 \\ \hline
594 $R_{E-P}$ & CG & 2.15 & 45.36 & 25.89 & 19.47 \\ \hline
595 $R_{E}$ & CG & 2.15 & 45.36 & 26.70 & 18.66 \\ \hline
597 $EPSA$ & MG & 1.47 & 34.97 & 21.69 & 13.27 \\ \hline
598 $R_{E-P}$ & MG & 2.15 & 43.65 & 40.45 & 3.20 \\ \hline
599 $R_{E}$ & MG & 2.15 & 43.64 & 41.38 & 2.26 \\ \hline
601 $EPSA$ & EP & 1.04 & 22.14 & 20.73 & 1.41 \\ \hline
602 $R_{E-P}$ & EP & 1.92 & 39.40 & 56.33 & -16.93 \\ \hline
603 $R_{E}$ & EP & 1.92 & 38.10 & 56.35 & -18.25 \\ \hline
605 $EPSA$ & LU & 1.38 & 35.83 & 22.49 & 13.34 \\ \hline
606 $R_{E-P}$ & LU & 2.15 & 44.97 & 41.00 & 3.97 \\ \hline
607 $R_{E}$ & LU & 2.15 & 44.97 & 41.80 & 3.17 \\ \hline
609 $EPSA$ & BT & 1.31 & 29.60 & 21.28 & 8.32 \\ \hline
610 $R_{E-P}$ & BT & 2.13 & 45.60 & 49.84 & -4.24 \\ \hline
611 $R_{E}$ & BT & 2.13 & 44.90 & 55.16 & -10.26 \\ \hline
613 $EPSA$ & SP & 1.38 & 33.48 & 21.35 & 12.12 \\ \hline
614 $R_{E-P}$ & SP & 2.10 & 45.69 & 43.60 & 2.09 \\ \hline
615 $R_{E}$ & SP & 2.10 & 45.75 & 44.10 & 1.65 \\ \hline
617 $EPSA$ & FT & 1.47 & 34.72 & 19.00 & 15.72 \\ \hline
618 $R_{E-P}$ & FT & 2.04 & 39.40 & 37.10 & 2.30 \\ \hline
619 $R_{E}$ & FT & 2.04 & 39.35 & 37.70 & 1.65 \\ \hline
621 \label{table:compareC}
622 % is used to refer this table in the text
624 As shown in Table~\ref{table:compareC}, the ($R_{E-P}$) method outperforms the ($R_{E}$)
625 method in terms of performance and energy reduction. The ($R_{E-P}$) method
626 also gives better energy savings than our method. However, although our scaling
627 factor is not optimal for energy reduction, the results in this table prove
628 that our algorithm returns the best scaling factor that satisfy our objective
629 method: the largest distance between energy reduction and performance
630 degradation. Figure~\ref{fig:compare} illustrates even better the distance between
631 the energy reduction and performance degradation. The negative values mean that one of
632 the two objectives (energy or performance) have been degraded more than the
633 other. The positive trade-offs with the highest values lead to maximum energy
634 savings while keeping the performance degradation as low as possible. Our
635 algorithm always gives the highest positive energy to performance trade-offs
636 while Rauber and Rünger's method, ($R_{E-P}$), gives sometimes negative
637 trade-offs such as in BT and EP.
640 % \includegraphics[width=.328\linewidth]{fig/compare_class_A}
641 % \includegraphics[width=.328\linewidth]{fig/compare_class_B}
642 \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{fig/compare_class_C}
643 \caption{Comparing our method to Rauber and Rünger's methods}
650 In this paper, we have presented a new online scaling factor selection method
651 that optimizes simultaneously the energy and performance of a distributed
652 application running on an homogeneous cluster. It uses the computation and
653 communication times measured at the first iteration to predict energy
654 consumption and the performance of the parallel application at every available
655 frequency. Then, it selects the scaling factor that gives the best trade-off
656 between energy reduction and performance which is the maximum distance between
657 the energy and the inverted performance curves. To evaluate this method, we
658 have applied it to the NAS benchmarks and it was compared to Rauber and Rünger
659 methods while being executed on the simulator SimGrid. The results showed that
660 our method, outperforms Rauber and Rünger's methods in terms of energy-performance
663 In the near future, we would like to adapt this scaling factor selection method
664 to heterogeneous platforms where each node has different characteristics. In
665 particular, each CPU has different available frequencies, energy consumption and
666 performance. It would be also interesting to develop a new energy model for
667 asynchronous parallel iterative methods where the number of iterations is not
668 known in advance and depends on the global convergence of the iterative system.
670 \section*{Acknowledgment}
672 This work has been partially supported by the Labex ACTION project (contract
673 ``ANR-11-LABX-01-01''). Computations have been performed on the supercomputer
674 facilities of the Mésocentre de calcul de Franche-Comté. As a PhD student,
675 Mr. Ahmed Fanfakh, would like to thank the University of Babylon (Iraq) for
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692 %%% ispell-local-dictionary: "american"
695 % LocalWords: Fanfakh Charr FIXME Tianhe DVFS HPC NAS NPB SMPI Rauber's Rauber
696 % LocalWords: CMOS EQ EPSA Franche Comté Tflop Rünger IUT Maréchal Juin cedex