SentiLog

Abstract

As core components of High-performance computing (HPC) platforms, parallel file systems (PFSes) grow quickly in scale and complexity, hence are subject to various failures and anomalies. Identifying their anomalies in runtime is critically helpful for HPC operators and administrators. Analyzing the runtime logs to detect the anomalies of large-scale systems has been proven effective in many recent studies. However, applying them to parallel file systems logs faces significant challenges due to the large volume and irregularity of PFSes logs. This study proposes SentiLog, a new approach to analyzing PFSes system logs for detecting anomalies. Unlike existing solutions, SentiLog works by training a general sentimental, natural language model based on the logging-relevant source code collected from a set of PFSes. In this way, SentiLog learns information embedded by developers from the source code. Our preliminary results show SentiLog is able to accurately predict anomalies and performs better than state-of-the-art log analysis solutions on two representative PFSes (Lustre and BeeGFS). This preliminary study shows sentiment analysis could be a promising method to analyze complex and irregular system logs.