Paper Info
Title
A scalable double in-memory checkpoint and restart scheme towards exascale
Abstract
As the size of supercomputers increases, the probability of system failure grows substantially, posing an increasingly significant challenge for scalability. It is important to provide resilience for long running applications. Checkpoint-based fault tolerance methods are effective approaches at dealing with faults. With these methods, the state of the entire parallel application is checkpointed to reliable storage. When a failure occurs, the application is restarted from a recent checkpoint. In previous work, we have demonstrated an efficient double in-memory checkpoint and restart fault tolerance scheme, which leverages Charm++'s parallel objects for checkpointing. In this paper, we further optimize the scheme by eliminating several bottlenecks caused by serialized communication. We extend the in-memory checkpointing scheme to work on MPI communication layer, and demonstrate the performance on very large scale supercomputers. For example, when running a one million atom molecular dynamics simulation on up to 64K cores of a BlueGene/P machine, the checkpoint time was in milliseconds. The restart time was measured to be less than 0.15 seconds on 64K cores.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/DSNW.2012.6264677
DSN Workshops
Keywords
Field
DocType
parallel processing,application program interfaces,checkpointing,fault tolerant computing,mainframes,mpi communication layer,exascale,very large scale supercomputers,double in-memory checkpointing scheme,restart scheme,message passing,checkpoint-based fault tolerance methods,parallel application,optimization,fault tolerance,protocols
Computer science,Parallel computing,Parallel processing,Communication layer,Real-time computing,Fault tolerance,Message passing,Scalability,Distributed computing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4673-2265-2
43
1.29
References 
Authors
11
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gengbin Zheng182955.03
Xiang Ni21416.58
Laxmikant V. Kale32871248.18