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Dragonfly is an indispensable interconnect topology for exascale high-performance computing (HPC) systems. To link tens of thousands of compute nodes at a reasonable cost, Dragonfly shares network resources with the entire system such that network bandwidth is not exclusive to any single application. Since HPC systems are usually shared among multiple co-running applications at the same time, network competition between co-existing workloads is inevitable. This network contention manifests as workload interference, in which a job’s network communication can be severely delayed by other jobs. This study presents a comprehensive examination of leveraging intelligent routing and flexible job placement to mitigate workload interference on Dragonfly systems. Specifically, we leverage the parallel discrete event simulation toolkit, the Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST), to investigate workload interference on Dragonfly with three contributions. We first present Q-adaptive routing, a multi-agent reinforcement learning routing scheme, and a flexible job placement strategy that, together, can mitigate workload interference based on workload communication characteristics. Next, we enhance SST with Q-adaptive routing and develop an automatic module that serves as the bridge between the SST and HPC job scheduler for automatic simulation configuration and automated simulation launching. Finally, we extensively examine workload interference under various job placement and routing configurations.
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This content will become publicly available on September 12, 2026
MFNetSim: A Multi-Fidelity Network Simulation Framework for Multi-Traffic Modeling of Dragonfly Systems
In high-performance computing (HPC), modern supercomputers typically provide exclusive computing resources to user applications. Nevertheless, the interconnect network is a shared resource for both inter-node communication and across-node I/O access, among co-running workloads, leading to inevitable network interference. In this study, we develop MFNetSim, a multi-fidelity modeling framework that enables simulation of multi-traffic simultaneously over the interconnect network, including inter-process communication and I/O traffic. By combining different levels of abstraction, MFNetSim can efficiently co-model the communication and I/O traffic occurring on HPC systems equipped with flash-based storage. We conduct simulation studies of hybrid workloads composed of traditional HPC applications and emerging ML applications on a 1,056-node Dragonfly system with various configurations. Our analysis provides various observations regarding how network interference affects communication and I/O traffic.
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- PAR ID:
- 10616977
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation
- ISSN:
- 1049-3301
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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