GPU Age-Aware Scheduling to Improve the Reliability of Leadership Jobs on Titan

In 2015, OLCF's Titan supercomputer experienced a significant increase in GPU related job failures. The impact on jobs was serious and OLCF decided to replace ~50% of the GPUs. Unfortunately, jobs using more than 20% of the machine (i.e., leadership jobs) continued to encounter higher levels of application failures. These jobs contained significant amounts of both the low-failure rate and high-failure rate GPUs. The impacts of these failures are more adversely felt by leadership jobs due to longer wait times, runtimes, and higher charge rates. In this work, we have designed techniques to increase the use of low-failure GPUs in leadership jobs through targeted resource allocation. We have employed two complementary techniques, updating both the system ordering and the allocation mechanisms. Using simulation, the application of these techniques resulted in a 33% increase in low-failure GPU hours being assigned to leadership jobs. Our GPU Age-Aware Scheduling has been used in production on Titan since July of 2017.