Dynamic Resource Management for Cloud-native Bulk Synchronous Parallel Applications

Many traditional high-performance computing applications including those that follow the Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) communication paradigm are increasingly being deployed in cloud-native virtualized and multi-tenant container clusters. However, such a shared, virtualized platform limits the degree of control that BSP applications can have in effectively allocating resources. This can adversely impact their performance, particularly when stragglers manifest in individual BSP supersteps. Existing BSP resource management solutions assume the same execution time for individual tasks at every superstep, which is not always the case. To address these limitations, we present a dynamic resource management middleware for cloud-native BSP applications comprising a heuristics algorithm that determines effective resource configurations across multiple supersteps while considering dynamic workloads per superstep, and trading off performance improvements with reconfiguration costs. Moreover, we design dynamic programming and reinforcement learning approaches that can be used as pluggable strategies to determine whether and when to enforce a reconfiguration. Empirical evaluations of our solution show between 10% and 25% improvement in performance over a baseline static approach even in the presence of reconfiguration penalty.