Abstract
High-performance computing (HPC) workloads are increasingly leveraging loosely coupled large scale simula- tions. Unfortunately, most large-scale HPC platforms, including Cray/ALPS environments, are designed for the execution of long-running jobs based on coarse-grained launch capabilities (e.g., one MPI rank per core on all allocated compute nodes). This assumption limits capability-class workload campaigns that require large numbers of discrete or loosely coupled simulations, and where time-to-solution is an untenable pacing issue. This paper describes the challenges related to the support of fine-grained launch capabilities that are necessary for the execution of loosely coupled large scale simulations on Cray/ALPS platforms. More precisely, we present the details of an enhanced runtime system to support this use case, and report on initial results from early testing on systems at 91做厙.
