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Failure prediction using machine learning in a virtualised HPC system and application

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Abstract

Failure is an increasingly important issue in high performance computing and cloud systems. As large-scale systems continue to grow in scale and complexity, mitigating the impact of failure and providing accurate predictions with sufficient lead time remains a challenging research problem. Traditional existing fault-tolerance strategies such as regular check-pointing and replication are not adequate because of the emerging complexities of high performance computing systems. This necessitates the importance of having an effective as well as proactive failure management approach in place aimed at minimizing the effect of failure within the system. With the advent of machine learning techniques, the ability to learn from past information to predict future pattern of behaviours makes it possible to predict potential system failure more accurately. Thus, in this paper, we explore the predictive abilities of machine learning by applying a number of algorithms to improve the accuracy of failure prediction. We have developed a failure prediction model using time series and machine learning, and performed comparison based tests on the prediction accuracy. The primary algorithms we considered are the support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), classification and regression trees (CART) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Experimental results indicates that the average prediction accuracy of our model using SVM when predicting failure is 90% accurate and effective compared to other algorithms. This finding implies that our method can effectively predict all possible future system and application failures within the system.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful review in improving the quality of this paper. We would also like to thank Bill Kramer and Akbar Mokhtarani from NERSC for collecting the data and sharing it. One of the authors Bashir Mohammed is a Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) scholar. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to PTDF for its funding support under the OSS scheme with Grant Number (PTDF/E/OSS/PHD/MB/651/14).

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Mohammed, B., Awan, I., Ugail, H. et al. Failure prediction using machine learning in a virtualised HPC system and application. Cluster Comput 22, 471–485 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-019-02917-1

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