Toward an Optimal Online Checkpoint Solution under a Two-Level HPC Checkpoint Model

The traditional single-level checkpointing method suffers from significant overhead on large-scale platforms. Hence, multilevel checkpointing protocols have been studied extensively in recent years. The multilevel checkpoint approach allows different levels of checkpoints to be set (each with differ...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 28; no. 1; pp. 244 - 259
Main Authors: Sheng Di, Robert, Yves, Vivien, Frederic, Cappello, Franck
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York IEEE 01.01.2017
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Subjects:
Checkpointing
Computational modeling
Computer crashes
Computer Science
Data Structures and Algorithms
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Error recovery
Fault tolerance
Fault tolerant systems
High-performance computing
Mathematical models
Multilevel
multilevel checkpoint
Optimization
Transient analysis
High-Performance Computing
Multilevel Checkpoint
Optimization
Fault Tolerance
ISSN:1045-9219, 1558-2183
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The traditional single-level checkpointing method suffers from significant overhead on large-scale platforms. Hence, multilevel checkpointing protocols have been studied extensively in recent years. The multilevel checkpoint approach allows different levels of checkpoints to be set (each with different checkpoint overheads and recovery abilities), in order to further improve the fault tolerance performance of extreme-scale HPC applications. How to optimize the checkpoint intervals for each level, however, is an extremely difficult problem. In this paper, we construct an easy-to-use two-level checkpoint model. Checkpoint level 1 deals with errors with low checkpoint/recovery overheads such as transient memory errors, while checkpoint level 2 deals with hardware crashes such as node failures. Compared with previous optimization work, our new optimal checkpoint solution offers two improvements: (1) it is an online solution without requiring knowledge of the job length in advance, and (2) it shows that periodic patterns are optimal and determines the best pattern. We evaluate the proposed solution and compare it with the most up-to-date related approaches on an extreme-scale simulation testbed constructed based on a real HPC application execution. Simulation results show that our proposed solution outperforms other optimized solutions and can improve the performance significantly in some cases. Specifically, with the new solution the wall-clock time can be reduced by up to 25.3 percent over that of other state-of-the-art approaches. Finally, a brute-force comparison with all possible patterns shows that our solution is always within 1 percent of the best pattern in the experiments.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:1045-9219
1558-2183
DOI:10.1109/TPDS.2016.2546248