Evaluating the Impact of Energy Efficient Networks on HPC Workloads

Interconnection networks grow larger as supercomputers include more nodes and require higher bandwidth for performance. This scaling significantly increases the fraction of power consumed by the network, by increasing the number of network components (links and switches). Typically, network links consume power continuously once they are turned on. However, recent proposals for energy efficient interconnects have introduced low-power operation modes for periods when network links are idle. Low-power operation can increase messaging time when switching a link from low-power to active operation. We extend the TraceR-CODES network simulator for power modeling to evaluate the impact of energy efficient networking on power and performance. Our evaluation presents the first study on both single-job and multi-job execution to realistically simulate power consumption and performance under congestion for a large-scale HPC network. Results on several workloads consisting of HPC proxy applications show that single-job and multi-job execution favor different modes of low power operation to have significant power savings at the cost of minimal performance degradation.