PowerAPI, GEOPM and Redfish: Open Interfaces for Power/Energy Measurement and Control
Authors: Ryan Grant (Sandia National Laboratories)
BP
Abstract: With every generation of new hardware, more power measurement and control capabilities are exposed. As software applications for these capabilities are developed and deployed, there is a need for open-interfaces and frameworks that allow for ease of communication between components within a platform as well as portability across platforms. In this BoF, we discuss three efforts for such open-interfaces and frameworks: these are PowerAPI, GEOPM and Redfish. The BoF will introduce each effort and feature an interactive panel discussion with experts from currently implementing and adopting organizations. There will also be a focus on synergy and compatibility between them.
Long Description: The trend to expose power measurement capabilities has allowed algorithm designers to add power and energy efficiency to their optimization criteria. Similarly, resource managers have power-aware scheduling to meet external utility constraints such as time of day cost charging. These are just two of many use cases for energy and power measurement and control capabilities.
However, differences in vendor proprietary interfaces to power measurement and control mechanisms result in duplication of effort and fragment the user base, rendering solutions non-portable between different systems.
Moreover, different vendors may be responsible for different components of the same system, including hardware, OS, application-level run time systems, schedulers, and RAS systems. Open-interfaces and frameworks such as the PowerAPI, GEOPM and Redfish are all directed towards improving these issues.
PowerAPI is a specification for power monitoring and control interfaces that defines common interfaces for interoperability between power management implementations.
Redfish is a specification for data center management that defines convenient RESTful interface for power monitoring, control, and broader data center management functions.
GEOPM is a runtime for power management that implements monitoring and control, and importantly: optimizes job performance under a given power constraint.
Following on the success of SC14 and SC15 BOFs and other community activities, the goals of the SC17 BOF are to: 1, to provide a high level comparative introduction to PowerAPI, GEOPM and Redfish, 2, to provide a forum for those implementing and using PowerAPI, GEOPM and Redfish to describe their efforts, 3, to identify potential non-compatibility or other interface issues between PowerAPI, GEOPM and Redfish and 4, to encourage communication, coordination and collaboration between PowerAPI, GEOPM and Redfish.
The potential audience for this audience is very broad because the open interfaces and standards affect all layers of the HPC software stack as well as the interface between the HPC system and the facility. It would be interesting to computer architects, facilities and operations managers, application engineers, system integrators and independent software/hardware vendors. Implementations are geographically diverse, including North America, Europe and Japan.
The PowerAPI BoF at SC15 had 55 attendees; 32 participants completed surveys. There were sessions and meetings held with a similar theme at the SC15 and SC16 Energy-Efficient HPC Working Group (EEHPCWG) workshop. The EEHPCWG held webinars on PowerAPI, GEOPM and Redfish; attendance ~50.
For the PowerAPI, a particular focus will be to initiate community ownership of the specification in the spirit of the MPI forum.
Again this year, attendees will be encouraged to complete an electronic and/or paper survey at the event.
The feedback will help shape the community around the three efforts and provide feedback into their development.
The outcome of the BOF will be a written report summarizing the results of a survey of the attendees, including their responses to the following questions:
What is the current distribution of PowerAPI, GEOPM and Redfish stakeholders? How would users like to participate in community development going forward? Should we create a GEOPM/PowerAPI/Redfish integration working group and what are the first tasks they will tackle?
Conference Presentation: pdf
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