This work is an experience with a deployed networked system for digital agriculture (or DA). Digital agriculture is the use of data-driven techniques towards a sustainable increase in farm productivity and efficiency. DA systems are expected to be overlaid on existing rural infrastructures, which are known to be less robust. While existing DA approaches partially address several infrastructure issues, challenges related to data aggregation, data analytics, and fault tolerance remain open. In this work, we present the design of Comosum, an extensible, reconfigurable, and fault-tolerant architecture of hardware, software, and distributed cloud abstractions to sense, analyze, and actuate on different farm types. FarmBIOS is an implementation of the Comosum architecture. We analyze FarmBIOS by leveraging various applications, deployment experiences, and network differences between urban and rural farms. This includes, for instance, an edge analytics application achieving 86% accuracy in vineyard disease detection. An eighteen-month deployment of FarmBIOS highlights Comosum’s fault tolerance. It was fault tolerant to intermittent network outages that lasted for several days during many periods of the deployment. We introduce active digital twins to cope with the unreliability of the underlying base systems.
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Incorporating Fault-Tolerance Awareness into System-Level Modeling and Simulation
As the design space for high-performance computer (HPC) systems grows larger and more complex, modeling and simulation (MODSIM) techniques become more important to better optimize systems. Furthermore, recent extreme-scale systems and newer technologies can lead to higher system fault rates, which negatively affect system performance and other metrics. Therefore, it is important for system designers to consider the effects of faults and fault-tolerance (FT) techniques on system design through MODSIM. BE-SST is an existing MODSIM methodology and workflow that facilitates preliminary exploration & reduction of large design spaces, particularly by highlighting areas of the space for detailed study and pruning less optimal areas. This paper presents the overall methodology for adding fault-tolerance awareness (FT-awareness) into BE-SST. We present the process used to extend BE-SST, enabling the creation of models that predict the time needed to perform a checkpoint instance for the given system configuration. Additionally, this paper presents a case study where a full HPC system is simulated using BE-SST, including application, hardware, and checkpointing. We validate the models and simulation against actual system measurements, finding an average percent error of less than 17% for the instance models and about 20% for system simulation, a level of accuracy acceptable for initial exploration and pruning of the design space. Finally, we show how FT-aware simulation results are used for comparing FT levels in the design space.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1738420
- PAR ID:
- 10348149
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 IEEE/ACM 11th Workshop on Fault Tolerance for HPC at eXtreme Scale (FTXS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 31 to 40
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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