arXiv · 2509.20819
Integrating and Characterizing HPC Task Runtime Systems for hybrid AI-HPC workloads
Abstract
Scientific workflows increasingly involve both HPC and machine-learning tasks, combining MPI-based simulations, training, and inference in a single execution. Launchers such as Slurm's srun constrain concurrency and throughput, making them unsuitable for dynamic and heterogeneous workloads. We present a performance study of RADICAL-Pilot (RP) integrated with Flux and Dragon, two complementary runtime systems that enable hierarchical resource management and high-throughput function execution. Using synthetic and production-scale workloads on Frontier, we characterize the task execution properties of RP across runtime configurations. RP+Flux sustains up to 930 tasks/s, and RP+Flux+Dragon exceeds 1,500 tasks/s with over 99.6% utilization. In contrast, srun peaks at 152 tasks/s and degrades with scale, with utilization below 50%. For IMPECCABLE.v2 drug discovery campaign, RP+Flux reduces makespan by 30-60% relative to srun/Slurm and increases throughput more than four times on up to 1,024. These results demonstrate hybrid runtime integration in RP as a scalable approach for hybrid AI-HPC workloads.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Andre Merzky, Mikhail Titov, Matteo Turilli, Shantenu Jha. 2025-09-25. Integrating and Characterizing HPC Task Runtime Systems for hybrid AI-HPC workloads. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20819
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.