Minimizing Thermal Variation Across System Components

Abstract

Thermal overheating is a serious concern in modern supercomputing systems. Elevated temperature levels reduce the reliability and the lifetime of the underlying hardware and increase their power consumption. Previous studies on mitigating thermal hotspots at the hardware and run-time system levels have typically used approaches that trade off performance for reduced operating temperatures. In this paper, we first show that in a large-scale system, physical attributes cause an uneven temperature distribution. We then develop a model to characterize the thermal behaviour of a complex system using various machine learning methods. We propose to improve application placement by incorporating thermal awareness into the decision-making process. Specifically, our system predicts the thermal condition of the system based on application mapping and uses these predictions to mitigate thermal hotspots without any performance loss. We provide two versions of our prediction mechanism. On a two-node configuration, these models achieve 72.5% and 78.8% success rates in their predictions, respectively. In other words, the scheduling decisions of our models result in a task placement that has a lower maximum average temperature. Overall, the more aggressive scheme reduces the average peak temperature by up to 11.9°C (2.3°C on average) without any performance degradation.