Title
A scalable and extensible checkpointing scheme for massively parallel simulations
Abstract
AbstractRealistic simulations in engineering or in the materials sciences can consume enormous computing resources and thus require the use of massively parallel supercomputers. The probability of a failure increases both with the runtime and with the number of system components. For future exascale systems, it is therefore considered critical that strategies are developed to make software resilient against failures. In this article, we present a scalable, distributed, diskless, and resilient checkpointing scheme that can create and recover snapshots of a partitioned simulation domain. We demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the checkpoint strategy for simulations with up to 40 billion computational cells executing on more than 400 billion floating point values. A checkpoint creation is shown to require only a few seconds and the new checkpointing scheme scales almost perfectly up to more than 260, 000 (218) processes. To recover from a diskless checkpoint during runtime, we realize the recovery algorithms using ULFM MPI. The checkpointing mechanism is fully integrated in a state-of-the-art high-performance multi-physics simulation framework. We demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the method with a realistic phase-field simulation originating in the material sciences and with a lattice Boltzmann method implementation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1177/1094342018767736
Periodicals
Keywords
Field
DocType
Resilience, checkpoint-restart, supercomputing, scalable parallel algorithms, parallel performance, HPC, ULFM, MPI
Supercomputer,Floating point,Massively parallel,Computer science,Parallel computing,Software,Snapshot (computer storage),Extensibility,Scalability
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
33
4
1094-3420
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
5
0.41
32
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nils Kohl160.77
Johannes Hötzer2172.48
Florian Schornbaum3484.25
Martin Bauer4403.82
Christian Godenschwager5443.82
Harald Köstler619725.94
Britta Nestler75410.25
Ulrich Rüde850572.00