Computer Science ETDs

Kurt Ferreira

Publication Date

12-1-2011

Abstract

Next-generation exascale systems, those capable of performing a quintillion operations per second, are expected to be delivered in the next 8-10 years. These systems, which will be 1,000 times faster than current systems, will be of unprecedented scale. As these systems continue to grow in size, faults will become increasingly common, even over the course of small calculations. Therefore, issues such as fault tolerance and reliability will limit application scalability. Current techniques to ensure progress across faults like checkpoint/restart, the dominant fault tolerance mechanism for the last 25 years, are increasingly problematic at the scales of future systems due to their excessive overheads. In this work, we evaluate a number of techniques to decrease the overhead of checkpoint/restart and keep this method viable for future exascale systems. More specifically, this work evaluates state-machine replication to dramatically increase the checkpoint interval (the time between successive checkpoints) and hash-based, probabilistic incremental checkpointing using graphics processing units to decrease the checkpoint commit time (the time to save one checkpoint). Using a combination of empirical analysis, modeling, and simulation, we study the costs and benefits of these approaches on a wide range of parameters. These results, which cover of number of high-performance computing capability workloads, different failure distributions, hardware mean time to failures, and I/O bandwidths, show the potential benefits of these techniques for meeting the reliability demands of future exascale platforms.

Language

English

Keywords

Checkpoint/ Restart, Reliability, Exascale, State-Machine Replication

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Computer Science

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Department of Computer Science

First Committee Member (Chair)

Arnold, Dorian

Second Committee Member

Taufer, Michela

Third Committee Member

Crandall, Jed

Project Sponsors

Sandia National Laboratories, Laboratory Directed Research & Development Program

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