Instruction-Tuned LLMs for Parsing and Mining Unstructured Logs on Leadership HPC Systems

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 6 Apr 2026] Instruction-Tuned LLMs for Parsing and Mining Unstructured Logs on Leadership HPC Systems Ahmad Maroof Karimi, Jong Youl Choi, Charles Qing Cao, Awais Khan Leadership-class HPC systems generate massive volumes of heterogeneous, largely unstructured system logs. Because these logs originate from diverse software, hardware, and runtime layers, they exhibit inconsistent formats, making structure extraction and pattern discovery extremely challenging. Therefore, robust log parsing and mining is critical to transform this raw telemetry into actionable insights that reveal operational patterns, diagnose anomalies, and enable reliable, efficient, and scalable system analysis. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer a promising new direction for automated log understanding in leadership-class HPC environments. To capitalize on this opportunity, we present a domain-adapted, instruction-following, LLM-driven framework that leverages chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to parse and structure HPC logs with high fidelity. Our approach combines domain-specific log-template data with instruction-tuned examples to fine-tune an 8B-parameter LLaMA model tailored for HPC log analysis. We develop a hybrid fine-tuning methodology that adapts a general-purpose LLM to domain-specific log data, enabling privacy-preserving, locally deployable, fast, and energy-efficient log-mining approach. We conduct experiments on a diverse set of log datasets from the LogHub repository. The evaluation confirms that our approach achieves parsing accuracy on par with significantly larger models, such as LLaMA 70B and Anthropic's Claude. We further validate the practical utility of our fine-tuned LLM model by parsing over 600 million production logs from the Frontier supercomputer over a four-week window, uncovering critical patterns in temporal dynamics, node-level anomalies, and workload-error log correlations. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.05168 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.05168v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.05168 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Ahmad Maroof Karimi [view email] [v1] Mon, 6 Apr 2026 20:59:48 UTC (4,336 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)