Monitoring Performance in Large Scale Computing Clouds with Passive Benchmarking

Providers of computing services such as data science clouds need to maintain large hardware infrastructures often with thousands of nodes. Using commodity hardware leads to heterogeneous setups that differ significantly in individual nodes' performance, which must be understood to allow for accounting, strategic planning, and to identify problems and bottle-necks. Today's method of choice are active benchmarks, but they disturb normal operations and are too expensive to run continuously. They also struggle to be representative of an ever changing workload. We therefore design a passive benchmark-ing technique, which computes expressive and accurate perfor-mance metrics based on actual workloads. We prove the quality and performance benefits of our passive benchmark on a prac-tical workload in one of the world's largest scientific computing infrastructures, the CERN Computing Center. In fact, our approach allows continuous benchmarking of the active system, while avoiding costs in terms of downtime and achieves prediction quality comparable to the state-of-the-art approach of active benchmarking