2022/11/01 by Bartłomiej Przybylski, Maciej Pawlik, Przybylski, Bartłomiej +9 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Cloud Computing and Resource Management #Distributed #Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #Scientific Computing and Data Management #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2211.00717
openalex publication_date 2022/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Modern HPC workload managers and their careful tuning contribute to the high utilization of HPC clusters. However, due to inevitable uncertainty it is impossible to completely avoid node idleness. Although such idle slots are usually too short for any HPC job, they are too long to ignore them. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm promisingly fills this gap, and can be a good match, as typical FaaS functions last seconds, not hours. Here we show how to build a FaaS infrastructure on idle nodes in an HPC cluster in such a way that it does not affect the performance of the HPC jobs significantly. We dynamically adapt to a changing set of idle physical machines, by integrating open-source software Slurm and OpenWhisk. We designed and implemented a prototype solution that allowed us to cover up to 90% of the idle time slots on a 50k-core cluster that runs production workloads.