Quarterly newsletter, January 2021

Platform notes:

Logistics:

  • All of the ANL-hosted git repositories (https://xgitlab.cels.anl.gov/sds/) will be moving within the next few months. We will communicate when that happens.
    • There are no changes to policy or access (in fact, access will likely change for the better); it’s just that the xgitlab.cels instance that we are using is being decommissioned
  • We are working on landing a Spack PR (https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/20273) that will introduce a “mochi-margo” package, maintained by us, to replace the out-of-date “margo” package
    • Once this is done, we will likely start upstreaming more packages that depend on margo-mochi

Mochi service development news:

  • Work continues on a new component called “Bedrock” that can be used to more easily bootstrap microservice compositions (https://xgitlab.cels.anl.gov/sds/bedrock).
    • Bedrock is already available, and we are in the process of updating existing services to use it.
    • You can think of bedrock as a general-purpose Mochi daemon that takes a JSON configuration file describing how to spin up embedded microservices
  • We are actively working on performance tuning of “Benvolio”, which you can think of as a runtime I/O delegation service (i.e. that provides a more generic version of MPI-IO aggregation capabilities). https://xgitlab.cels.anl.gov/sds/benvolio

Upcoming training events:

  • We plan to host a BoF session at this year’s (virtual) ECP annual meeting
    in mid-April, with a mechanism for people to sign up for one on one
    sessions for more detailed interaction. (https://ecpannualmeeting.com/)
  • Please let us know what other kinds of outreach/training you are interested in this year.

Mochi at SC 2020

Highlighted events for the Mochi project at this year’s SC conference included the following:

  • Pascal Grosset, Jesus Pulido, and James Ahrens. 2020. “Personalized In Situ Steering for Analysis and Visualization,” in ISAV’20 In Situ Infrastructures for Enabling Extreme-Scale Analysis and Visualization (ISAV’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–6. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3426462.3426463
  • Christopher Kelly, Sungsoo Ha, Kevin Huck, Hubertus Van Dam, Line Pouchard, Gyorgy Matyasfalvi, Li Tang, Nicholas D’Imperio, Wei Xu, Shinjae Yoo, and Kerstin Kleese Van Dam. 2020. “Chimbuko: A Workflow-Level Scalable Performance Trace Analysis Tool,” in ISAV’20 In Situ Infrastructures for Enabling Extreme-Scale Analysis and Visualization (ISAV’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 15–19. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3426462.3426465
  • P. Carns, K. Harms, B. Settlemyer, B. Atkinson and R. Ross, “Keeping It Real: Why HPC Data Services Don’t Achieve I/O Microbenchmark Performance,” in 2020 IEEE/ACM Fifth International Parallel Data Systems Workshop (PDSW), GA, USA, 2020 pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1109/PDSW51947.2020.00006

Mochi at SC 2019

Highlighted events for the Mochi project at this year’s Supercomputing included:

  • Srinivasan Ramesh, Philip Carns, Robert Ross, Shane Snyder, and Allen Malony. “Profiling Composable HPC Data Services”, Work-In-Progress report at the 4th International Parallel Data Systems Workshop (PDSW 2019). LINK (paper) LINK (slides)
  • Jerome Soumagne et al. “Data Services for High Performance Computing”, Birds of a Feather session. LINK