Oikonomos-II: A Reinforcement-Learning, Resource-Recommendation System for Cloud HPC

The cloud has become a powerful and useful environment for the deployment of High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications, but the large number of available instance types poses a challenge in selecting the optimal platform. Users often do not have the time or knowledge necessary to make an optimal choice. Recommender systems have been developed for this purpose but current state-of-the-art systems either require large amounts of training data, or require running the application multiple times; this is costly. In this work, we propose Oikonomos-II, a resource-recommendation system based on reinforcement learning for HPC applications in the cloud. Oikonomos-II models the relationship between different input parameters, instance types, and execution times. The system does not require any preexisting training data or repeated job executions, as it gathers its own training data opportunistically using user-submitted jobs, employing a variant of the Neural-LinUCB algorithm. When deployed on a mix of HPC applications, Oikonomos-II quickly converged towards an optimal policy. The system eliminates the need for preexisting training data or auxiliary runs, providing an economical, general-purpose, resource-recommendation system for cloud HPC.