MTAGS 2008 Workshop
The 1st workshop on Many-Task Computing on Grids and Supercomputers (MTAGS) will provide the scientific community a dedicated forum for presenting new research, development, and deployment efforts of loosely coupled large scale applications on large scale clusters, Grids, and/or Supercomputers. Many-task computing (MTC), the theme of the workshop encompasses loosely coupled applications, which are generally composed of many tasks (both independent and dependent tasks) to achieve some larger application goal. We welcome paper submissions on all topics related to MTC on large scale systems. Papers will be peer-reviewed, and accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings as part of the IEEE digital library. The workshop will be co-located with the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing 2008 Conference in Austin Texas on November 17th, 2008; for more information on the location (time and room) of the workshop, please see http://scyourway.nacse.org/conference/view/wksp117.
News
November 14th, 2008: | Location Information: Room 11AB |
November 14th, 2008: | Papers are online |
October 19th, 2008: | Keynote Speaker: Alan Gara, IBM Fellow and Blue Gene chief architect, IBM Research, Watson Research Center (Yorktown) |
October 2nd, 2008: | Accepted papers: We have concluded our review process. We had a total of 22 abstracts submitted, of which 16 were followed up with papers. Being that the workshop will be only a half-day workshop, we only had 6 slots available for papers, which gave us an acceptance rate of 37%. Please check the workshop program for the list of accepted papers, and the keynote talk (TBA). We are extremely pleased with the number of submissions, and quality of the accepted papers, and look forward to a great workshop on November 17th, in Austin Texas. |
Scope
This workshop will focus on the ability to manage and execute large scale applications on today's largest clusters, Grids, and Supercomputers. Clusters with 50K+ processor cores are beginning to come online (i.e. TACC Sun Constellation System - Ranger), Grids (i.e. TeraGrid) with a dozen sites and 100K+ processors, and supercomputers with 160K processors (i.e. IBM BlueGene/P). Large clusters and supercomputers have traditionally been high performance computing (HPC) systems, as they are efficient at executing tightly coupled parallel jobs within a particular machine with low-latency interconnects; the applications typically use message passing interface (MPI) to achieve the needed inter-process communication. On the other hand, Grids have been the preferred platform for more loosely coupled applications that tend to be managed and executed through workflow systems. In contrast to HPC (tightly coupled applications), these loosely coupled applications make up a new class of applications as what we call Many-Task Computing (MTC). MTC systems generally involve the execution of independent, sequential jobs that can be individually scheduled on many different computing resources across multiple administrative boundaries. MTC systems typically achieve this using various grid computing technologies and techniques, and often times use files to achieve the inter-process communication as alternative communication mechanisms than MPI. MTC is reminiscent to High Throughput Computing (HTC); however, MTC differs from HTC in the emphasis of using many computing resources over short periods of time to accomplish many computational tasks, where the primary metrics are measured in seconds (e.g. FLOPS, tasks/sec, MB/s I/O rates). HTC on the other hand requires large amounts of computing for longer times (months and years, rather than hours and days, and are generally measured in operations per month).
Today's existing HPC systems are a viable platform to host MTC applications. However, some challenges arise in large scale applications when run on large scale systems, which can hamper the efficiency and utilization of these large scale systems. These challenges vary from local resource manager scalability and granularity, efficient utilization of the raw hardware, shared file system contention and scalability, reliability at scale, application scalability, and understanding the limitations of the HPC systems in order to identify good candidate MTC applications.
For an interesting discussion in a recent blog by Ian Foster on the difference between MTC and HTC, please see his blog at http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/many-tasks-comp.html. We also published a paper in SC08 that is highly relevant to the workshop (and in part motivated the organization of this workshop), titled "Toward Loosely Coupled Programming on Petascale Systems"; more information about this paper, please see http://scyourway.nacse.org/conference/view/pap349. Finally, there is also a relevant Birds-of-Feather (BOF) session at SC08 called "Megajobs: How to Run One Million Jobs"; for more information on this BOF, please see http://gridfarm007.ucs.indiana.edu/megajobBOF/index.php/Main_Page.
Topics
MTAGS 2008 topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Compute Resource Management in large scale clusters, large Grids, and Supercomputers
- Scheduling
- Job execution frameworks
- Local resource manager extensions
- Performance evaluation of resource managers in use on large scale systems
- Challenges in running many-task workloads on HPC systems
Data Management in large scale Grid and Supercomputer environments:
- Data-Aware Scheduling
- Shared File System performance and scalability in large deployments
- Distributed file systems
- Data caching frameworks and techniques
Large-Scale Workflow Systems
- Workflow system performance and scalability analysis
- Scalability of workflow systems
- Workflow infrastructure and e-Science middleware
- Programming Paradigms and Models
Large-Scale Many-Task Applications
- Large-scale many-task applications
- Large-scale many-task data-intensive applications
- Large-scale high throughput computing (HTC) applications
- Quasi-supercomputing applications, deployments, and experiences
Paper Submission and Publication
Authors are invited to submit papers with unpublished, original work of not more than 10 pages of double column text using single spaced 10 point size on 8.5 x 11 inch pages, as per IEEE 8.5 x 11 manuscript guidelines (http://www.computer.org/portal/site/cscps/menuitem.02df7cde46985ea21618fc2e6bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pName=cscps_level1&path=cscps/cps&file=cps_forms.xml&xsl=generic.xsl&). A 250 word abstract (PDF format) must be submitted online at https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/MTAGS2008/ before the deadline of August 15th, 2008 at 11:59PM PST; the final 6/10 page papers in PDF format will be due on September 6th, 2008 at 11:59PM PST. Papers will be peer-reviewed, and accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings as part of the IEEE digital library; IEEE copyright forms will have to be completed and signed. Notifications of the paper decisions will be sent out by October 1st. Selected excellent work may be eligible for additional post-conference publication as journal articles or book chapters. Submission implies the willingness of at least one of the authors to register and present the paper.
Important Dates
Abstract Due: August 15th, 2008
Papers
Due: September
14th, 2008
Notification of Acceptance:
October 1st, 2008
Camera Ready Papers Due: November 3rd, 2008
Workshop Date: November 17th, 2008
Committee Members
Workshop Chairs
Ian Foster, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory
Yong Zhao, Microsoft
Ioan Raicu, University of Chicago
Technical Committee
David Abramson, Monash University, Australia
Dan Ardelean, Google, USA
Pete Beckman, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
Peter Dinda, Northwestern University, USA
Ian Foster, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory, USA
Alan Gara, IBM, USA
Bob Grossman, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Indranil Gupta, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
Alexandru Iosup, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Kamil Iskra, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
Tevfik Kosar, Louisiana State University, USA
Chuang Liu, Ask.com, USA
Shiyong Lu, Wayne State University, USA
Reagan Moore, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
Steven Newhouse, Microsoft, USA
Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Purdue University, USA
Marlon Pierce, Indiana University, USA
Ioan Raicu, University of Chicago, USA
Dan Reed, Microsoft, USA
Matei Ripeanu, University of British Columbia, Canada
Rick Stevens, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory, USA
Xian-He Sun, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
Alex Szalay, The Johns Hopkins University, USA
Douglas Thain, University of Notre Dame, USA
Greg Thain, University of Wisconsin, USA
Mike Wilde, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory, USA
Matthew Woitaszek, The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, USA
Lingyun Yang, Yahoo Search, USA
Sherali Zeadally, University of the District of Columbia, USA
Yong Zhao, Microsoft, USA
To return to MTAGS08 main page, click here.