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FusedOS

FusedOS is an operating system (OS) research project at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. This repository contains the prototype of FusedOS for the IBM Blue Gene/Q system.

We have released this prototype under an open-source license to enable collaboration with parties outside IBM. Most parts of FusedOS are available to you under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) while some parts are also available to you under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. Please feel free to explore the source code and the documentation provided here.

Overview

The documentation in this repository is structured as follows:

What is FusedOS

In this section, we first discuss the idea behind FusedOS and then describe what you can do with our prototype today.

General-purpose operating systems provide a rich set of functionality to support a broad set of applications, whereas specialized systems such as the IBM Blue Gene/Q are tailored to a specific category of applications. Therefore, specialized systems provide only the features that are absolutely required, in a way to provide the targeted applications the best possible quality of service.

FusedOS is our approach to bridge the gap between these two extremes. We combine a general-purpose OS with a specialized OS and run them side by side using resource partitioning. In contrast to operating systems running next to each other in a virtualized environment, the OS instances in FusedOS are much closer and process interaction can cross the boundary between them.

Our prototype runs on the IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer and combines Linux with the IBM compute node kernel (CNK), the production OS on Blue Gene/Q compute nodes. Booting FusedOS turns a compute node partition into a hybrid cluster; They can run both Linux and CNK applications. Furthermore, Linux and CNK applications can run side by side on each node at the same time, and even interact with each other. You can even run several different CNK applications on a FusedOS node at the same time, whereas CNK only allows one application to start as multiple processes.

You can connect to each individual compute node via SSH and run Linux processes as usual. For running CNK applications, you start the tool cl from Linux. The popular SLURM resource manager is available for launching jobs over several nodes. SLURM can be used to start CNK MPI applications.

When FusedOS runs on both IO and compute nodes, the IO nodes can export external network file systems to compute nodes. On compute nodes, both CNK and Linux applications have the same view of local and remote file systems. In case there are no external file systems available or IO nodes cannot be rebooted, FusedOS can run out of node-local ramdisks. That mode still provides an environment sufficient for simple benchmarks and tests.

Architecture and Components

Please find the discussion of the FusedOS architecture and a description of the components of the prototype in docs/Architecture.md.

Getting Started

In this section, we describe how to prepare a build environment and how to build FusedOS. First, we list the requirements for a FusedOS build environment. Second, we describe how to checkout the main FusedOS repository and the source code of our modified Linux. Third, we provide you a step-by-step guide for preparing a build environment for FusedOS, namely a Blue-Gene/Q Driver with cross compilers. Finally, we discuss the steps required for building FusedOS.

Fulfilling the Requirements

We use Fedora 19 on PowerPC (64-bit) on our development systems. We will assume that environment in the following guidelines. While we only tested building FusedOS on actual hardware, a virtualized environment (even QEMU on non-ppc architectures) should work as well.

Besides a basic Linux installation, you will need basic developement tools such as gcc and make. We will provide instructions for installing the required Blue Gene/Q-specific development tools in this guide.

For running FusedOS, you need a Blue Gene/Q firmware binary built with

    FW_KFLAGS    = -D__KERNEL__ -DFW_DUAL_DOMAIN=1

set in the Makefile. Most current BGQ drivers should work. In any case, preparing a build environment for FusedOS will yield an appropriate firmware image.

Cloning the Source Respositories

First, clone the main repository of FusedOS

    $ git clone https://github.com/ibm-research/fusedos.git

Then, checkout the source of our modified Linux version as a git submodule inside the main repository

    $ cd fusedos/
    $ git submodule init
    $ git submodule update

Preparing a Build Environment

The FusedOS main repository contains instructions and a patch to build a Blue Gene/Q driver in a Fedora 19 installation. See buildenv/README.md for a step-by-step guide.

Building FusedOS

Now that you have prepared your build environment, you can build FusedOS. We recommend that you put your SSH public key(s) into ramdisk/modules/rootfs/src/root/.ssh/authorized_keys. This will allow you to login to the FusedOS instances you boot afterwards. Then, just call make in the main FusedOS repository

$ make

The build process will yield three binaries in boot/:

  • a Linux kernel image
  • a ramdisk image that will serve as the root file system of each node
  • an RoQ image that will run on a separate core and provide networking for Linux

In addition, it will build the following tools:

  • the SPC monitor spcm (in spcm/)
  • the loader for the SPC monitor spcml (in cl/src)
  • our CNK as a library OS cl (in cl/src)
  • a simple CNK application hello_world (in tests/fusedos)

If required you can customize the following properties of the build process:

  • output directory for the boot images (FUSEDOS_BOOT_DIR in the top-level Makefile)
  • location of the BGQ driver that you built according to the instructions (BGQ_FLOOR_DIR in the top-level Make.rules).

Booting and Running FusedOS

Booting a FusedOS cluster on a Blue Gene/Q system involves three steps. First, you determine the compute nodes and the attached IO nodes that will comprise the FusedOS cluster. Second, you launch FusedOS on the respective IO nodes and wait for the Linux boot process to complete. Finally, you launch FusedOS on the chosen compute nodes.

Selecting Nodes for FusedOS

We have successfully tested FusedOS on compute node partitions of 32, 64, 128, and 256 nodes. You need to run FusedOS both on a compute node partition and on all the I/O nodes connected to that partition to use all of its capabilities. All these I/O nodes have to be configured and booted as one I/O block. Further, they should have no links to other compute nodes than those used for FusedOS to avoid interference.

In addition to being configured as one block, they need to have the separate I/O torus enabled, which is not used in regular operation. This torus is a prerequisite for the RoQ network driver, which we use to connect the Linux instances on I/O and compute nodes to each other. The control system will enable the I/O torus when you add the additional boot option train_io_torus to the I/O block. Up to eight I/O nodes (those in one I/O drawer) can form a torus using electrical wiring usually present in each I/O drawer. However, as far as we know, the I/O torus is a purely experimental feature, so your experience may vary.

In our experience, we found the best configuration of compute node partitions and connected I/O blocks fulfulls two requirements:

  1. For all the I/O nodes, each I/O link connects to a compute node in that partition.
  2. For all compute nodes that have I/O links, that I/O link connects to a node in that I/O block.

If you cannot dedicate I/O nodes to FusedOS, you can run it on compute nodes only. However, you will not be able to SSH to the compute nodes or access network file systems from outside Blue Gene/Q. Your FusedOS instances will be constrained to use whatever you built into their ramdisk. In that case, comment out the so-called discovery step in roq/linux/roq. That mode of operation can be sufficient to trigger simple experiments via the console, though we have used it successfully to run CNK MPI applications.

Launching FusedOS on Nodes

We have prepared the script boot/boot_bgq.sh that you can use to boot FusedOS on Blue Gene/Q. Call it as

    $ boot_bgq.sh <BG/Q block to boot> default

If you decide to place the FusedOS boot images at another location, specify that directory in the environment variable FUSEDOS_BOOT_DIR. In case you might experiment with several ramdisks of different configurations, subsitute default with the specific configuration of ramdisk that you want to boot (the ramdisk configurations are actually text files in ramdisk/config and get copied to boot/config).

Boot Example

We will illustrate the steps above using an example. Imagine you have half a midplane available to run FusedOS, as a block labelled R00-M1-N00-256. In Blue Gene/Q terminology that is a quarter of a rack or 256 nodes. We assume that the specific Blue Gene/Q rack is configured so that eight I/O nodes (a block labelled R00-IC) are connected to the 256 compute nodes in R00-M1-N00-256, not to any other compute nodes.

In the case described above, you can boot FusedOS on both I/O and compute nodes without disturbing other users, as the I/O nodes do not have to serve other compute nodes. Thus, you would first call

    $ boot_bgq.sh R00-IC-torus default

and wait until Linux on the I/O nodes has booted successfully (boot message "rcS done."). Then, you can launch FusedOS on the compute nodes by calling

    $ boot_bgq.sh R00-M1-N00-256 default

On the I/O nodes, Linux will configure the outside Ethernet interfaces with the same IP addresses that a regular I/O node Linux would. It will print these addresses as part of the final boot messages. At that point, feel free to login to an I/O node using SSH.

Running Simple CNK Applications

We have encapsulated CNK as a Linux application called cl. For running a CNK application, you call cl and pass the application to launch as a parameter. Other parameters to cl specify how many and which SPCs should be allocated to the application. The default settings are enough for a simple, hello world-style application.

Once the FusedOS nodes have booted up, you can use SSH to login. As convenience features, the boot scripts generate an /etc/hosts with aliases irank<1..M> and crank<1..N> for the internal IPs of I/O and compute nodes, and IO nodes display their external IPs during boot:

    Welcome to r00icj02 (R00-IC-J02 eth0:A.B.C.D NA:0.0.0.0)

Use these IPs and names to login to a compute node. As all the compute nodes are basically equal, you may pick any of them:

    $ ssh root@<external ip of an IO node>
    Welcome to r00icj02 (R00-IC-J02 eth0:172.16.30.11 NA:0.0.0.0)
    root@r00icj02 [irank4 00100]:~ # ssh crank42
    Welcome to crank42 (R00-M1-N04-J16 NA:0.0.0.0 NA:0.0.0.0)
    root@crank42 [crank42 20110]:~ #

On the compute node, start the cl utility and pass the hello_world CNK applications as its parameter. cl and the other FusedOS utilities are located in /opt/fusedos/bin, which is in $PATH. Thus, just start

  root@crank42 [crank42 20110]:~ # cl /opt/fusedos/tests/hello_world
  Hello world, pid 1, fp sum 3.800000, getuid 0

Running CNK MPI Applications

On regular Blue Gene/Q systems, users launch MPI jobs using the runjob system. On FusedOS, launching CNK MPI jobs works differently, much closer to how you launch MPI jobs in Linux.

CNK MPI applications require specific setup and cleanup work on each node. We have packaged that functionality into the tool sfjs, which works as a frontend for cl. Further, we use the SLURM resource scheduler to spread the job over all participating nodes.

Launching a CNK MPI job in FusedOS involves creating an allocation in SLURM and then calling srun to make SLURM run sfjs with appropriate parameters on each node. The process is slightly different if you run an MPI job over all the nodes in the compute node partition or only over a subset. We describe both variants below.

Running CNK MPI jobs on a full compute node partition

    # salloc -N 256 # all the nodes in the partition
salloc: Granted job allocation 3
    # srun sfjs -- -s -t 16 mpi_helloworld

Arguments after the double-dash are passed to cl. The parameter -s and -t 16 are required for CNK MPI applications (more precisely, for the PAMI messaging library that they rely on). The parameters enable shared memory support and allocate 16 threads and the associated memory chunks for the CNK application. Both cl and sjfs print usage messages when called with -h or without any parameters.

A more extensive example with 2 MPI ranks on each node and 24 SPCs per MPI rank (i.e., process) would be as follows:

    # srun sfjs -p 2 -- -s -t 16 <some MPI app>

Running CNK MPI jobs on subblocks

The current support in FusedOS for running CNK MPI applications on subblocks is fully functional but places a few restrictions on which subsets of nodes can be used. Specifically, only nodes that form a rectangle in the Blue Gene/Q torus can be used for a job. Selecting appropriate blocks of nodes is made easy by the hostnames (crank<n>) we assign to compute nodes:

A contiguous set of N compute nodes crankA - crank(A+N-1) can be used for a subblock MPI job in FusedOS if and only if A is a multiple of N.

A few examples:

  • You can run jobs spanning 8 nodes on crank0-7, crank8-15, ..., crank64-71, crank72-79, and so on.
  • However, you cannot run jobs on crank4-11, as 4 is not a multiple of 8.
  • Jobs spanning 32 nodes work on blocks such as crank0-31, crank32-63, ..., crank128-159, ...
  • While crank40-47 is fine for a job with 8 nodes, crank40-71 does not work for a job with 32 nodes, as 40 is not a multiple of 32.
  • If your compute node partition spans 256 nodes, you can run 2 jobs over 128 nodes, at the same time: One on crank0-127, the other on crank128-255.

There is currently no explicit support for that allocation policy in SLURM. However, SLURM's default behavior worked quite acceptably for our experiments. sfjs will abort the job when the allocation does not fulfill the requirements, so badly placed jobs do fail in a defined way and leave the nodes and the torus in a usable state.

For technical reasons, you have to launch sfjs for two preparation steps, before you can start the actual MPI job. These steps have to be repeated before every MPI job:

    # salloc -N 16 --contiguous
salloc: Granted job allocation 4
    # srun sfjs -s prep
    # srun sfjs -s gion
    # srun sfjs -s go -- -s -t 16 mpi_helloworld

Of course, you can place these commands in a shell script and use SLURM's batch functionality:

    # sbatch -N 16 --contiguous some_batch_fusedos_mpi.sh

(More details about the preparation steps: Setting up the Blue Gene/Q torus for an MPI job involves a barrier synchronization between all involved nodes. CNK uses a barrier prepared by the firmware, which we cannot use in FusedOS for subblock jobs. Instead, we use the SLURM job steps, separated by the different srun calls, as an implicit barrier synchronization.)

Developer Information

There is no actual developer guide for FusedOS yet. We struggle with that task ourselves!

If you want to get a grasp of the FusedOS source, reread the section on the Architecture and Components of FusedOS and follow our pointers to the source code. In addition, we provide a list of recommended reading below. Please feel free to contact us if you have questions or recommendations.

During Linux boot, the fusedos init script loads the fusedosfs and mufs kernel modules and boots the SPC monitor on the SPCs, using binaries built into the ramdisk (see docsArchitecture.md for an explanation of these terms). When you are hacking FusedOS, you may want to disable that init script and load these components manually from a remote file system (or modify the init script to use your remote location).

Recommended reading and reference documentation: