A Comparison of Machine Learning Techniques for the On-line Characterization of Tasks Executed on Heterogeneous Compute Nodes

Automation becomes a vital part in the High-Performance computing system in situational dynamics to take the decisions on the fly. Heterogeneous compute nodes consist of computing resources such as CPU, GPU and FPGA and are the important components of the high-performance computing system that can adapt the automation to achieve the given goal. While implanting automation in the computing resources, management of the resources is one of the essential aspects that need to be taken care of. Tasks are continuously executed on the resources using its unique characteristics. Effective scheduling is essential to make the best use of the characteristics provided by each resource. Scheduling enables the execution of each task by allocating resources so that they take advantage of all the characteristics of the compute resources. Various scheduling heuristics can be used to create effective scheduling, which might require the execution time to schedule the task efficiently. Providing actual execution time is not possible in many cases; hence we can provide the estimations for the actual execution time . The purpose of this master's thesis is to design a predictive model or system that estimates the execution time required to execute tasks using historical execution time data on the heterogeneous compute nodes. In this thesis, regression techniques(SGD Regressor, Passive-Aggressive Regressor, MLP Regressor, and XCSF Regressor) are compared in terms of their prediction accuracy in order to determine which technique produces reliable predictions for the execution time. These estimations must be generated in an online learning environment in which data points arrive in any sequence, one by one, and the regression model must learn from them. After evaluating the regression algorithms, it is seen that the XCSF regressor provides the highest overall prediction accuracy for the supplied data sets. The regression technique's parameters also play a significant role in achieving an acceptable prediction accuracy. As a remark, when using online learning in regression analysis, the accuracy depends upon both the order of sequential data points that are coming to train the model and the parameter configuration for each regression technique.