Title: Big Data Meets HPC Log Analytics: Scalable Approach to Understanding Systems at Extreme Scale,
Abstract: Today's high-performance computing (HPC) systems are heavily instrumented,
generating logs containing information about abnormal events, such as critical
conditions, faults, errors and failures, system resource utilization, and about
the resource usage of user applications. These logs, once fully analyzed and
correlated, can produce detailed information about the system health, root
causes of failures, and analyze an application's interactions with the system,
providing valuable insights to domain scientists and system administrators.
However, processing HPC logs requires a deep understanding of hardware and
software components at multiple layers of the system stack. Moreover, most log
data is unstructured and voluminous, making it more difficult for system users
and administrators to manually inspect the data. With rapid increases in the
scale and complexity of HPC systems, log data processing is becoming a big data
challenge. This paper introduces a HPC log data analytics framework that is
based on a distributed NoSQL database technology, which provides scalability
and high availability, and the Apache Spark framework for rapid in-memory
processing of the log data. The analytics framework enables the extraction of a
range of information about the system so that system administrators and end
users alike can obtain necessary insights for their specific needs. We describe
our experience with using this framework to glean insights from the log data
about system behavior from the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory.