Using Simple PID Controllers to Prevent and Mitigate Faults in Scientific Workflows

Rafael Ferreira da Silva, Rosa Filgueira, Ewa Deelman, Erola Pairo-Castineira, Ian Overton, Malcolm Atkinson

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract / Description of output

Scientific workflows have become mainstream for conducting large-scale scientific research. As a result, many workflow applications and Workflow Management Systems (WMSs) have been developed as part of the cyberinfrastructure to allow scientists to execute their applications seamlessly on a range of distributed platforms. In spite of many success stories, a key challenge for running workflows in distributed systems is failure prediction, detection, and recovery. In this paper, we propose an approach to use control theory developed as part of autonomic computing to predict failures before they happen, and mitigated them when possible. The proposed approach apply the proportional-integral-derivative controller (PID controller) control loop mechanism, which is widely used in industrial control systems, to mitigate faults by adjusting the inputs of the mechanism. The PID controller aims at detecting the possibility of a fault far enough in advance so that an action can be performed to prevent it from happening. To demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, we tackle two common execution faults of the Big Data era|data footprint and memory usage. We define, implement, and evaluate simple PID controllers to autonomously manage data and memory usage of a bioinformatics work ow that consumes/produces over 4.4TB of data, and requires over 24TB of memory to run all tasks concurrently. Experimental results indicate that work flow executions may significantly benefit from PID controllers, in particular under online and unknown conditions. Simulation results show that nearly-optimal executions (slowdown of 1.01) can be attained when using our proposed method, and faults are detected and mitigated far in advance.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 11th Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science co-located with The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC 2016)
Place of PublicationSalt Lake City, Utah, USA
PublisherCEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
Pages15-24
Number of pages10
Publication statusPublished - 28 Feb 2017
Event11th Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science co-located with The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC 2016) - Salt Lake City, United States
Duration: 14 Nov 201614 Nov 2016
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1800/

Publication series

Name
PublisherCEUR Workshop Proceedings
Volume1800
ISSN (Print)1613-0073

Conference

Conference11th Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science co-located with The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC 2016)
Abbreviated titleWORKS 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySalt Lake City
Period14/11/1614/11/16
Internet address

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