53,736 research outputs found
Improving Performance of Iterative Methods by Lossy Checkponting
Iterative methods are commonly used approaches to solve large, sparse linear
systems, which are fundamental operations for many modern scientific
simulations. When the large-scale iterative methods are running with a large
number of ranks in parallel, they have to checkpoint the dynamic variables
periodically in case of unavoidable fail-stop errors, requiring fast I/O
systems and large storage space. To this end, significantly reducing the
checkpointing overhead is critical to improving the overall performance of
iterative methods. Our contribution is fourfold. (1) We propose a novel lossy
checkpointing scheme that can significantly improve the checkpointing
performance of iterative methods by leveraging lossy compressors. (2) We
formulate a lossy checkpointing performance model and derive theoretically an
upper bound for the extra number of iterations caused by the distortion of data
in lossy checkpoints, in order to guarantee the performance improvement under
the lossy checkpointing scheme. (3) We analyze the impact of lossy
checkpointing (i.e., extra number of iterations caused by lossy checkpointing
files) for multiple types of iterative methods. (4)We evaluate the lossy
checkpointing scheme with optimal checkpointing intervals on a high-performance
computing environment with 2,048 cores, using a well-known scientific
computation package PETSc and a state-of-the-art checkpoint/restart toolkit.
Experiments show that our optimized lossy checkpointing scheme can
significantly reduce the fault tolerance overhead for iterative methods by
23%~70% compared with traditional checkpointing and 20%~58% compared with
lossless-compressed checkpointing, in the presence of system failures.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, HPDC'1
CRAFT: A library for easier application-level Checkpoint/Restart and Automatic Fault Tolerance
In order to efficiently use the future generations of supercomputers, fault
tolerance and power consumption are two of the prime challenges anticipated by
the High Performance Computing (HPC) community. Checkpoint/Restart (CR) has
been and still is the most widely used technique to deal with hard failures.
Application-level CR is the most effective CR technique in terms of overhead
efficiency but it takes a lot of implementation effort. This work presents the
implementation of our C++ based library CRAFT (Checkpoint-Restart and Automatic
Fault Tolerance), which serves two purposes. First, it provides an extendable
library that significantly eases the implementation of application-level
checkpointing. The most basic and frequently used checkpoint data types are
already part of CRAFT and can be directly used out of the box. The library can
be easily extended to add more data types. As means of overhead reduction, the
library offers a build-in asynchronous checkpointing mechanism and also
supports the Scalable Checkpoint/Restart (SCR) library for node level
checkpointing. Second, CRAFT provides an easier interface for User-Level
Failure Mitigation (ULFM) based dynamic process recovery, which significantly
reduces the complexity and effort of failure detection and communication
recovery mechanism. By utilizing both functionalities together, applications
can write application-level checkpoints and recover dynamically from process
failures with very limited programming effort. This work presents the design
and use of our library in detail. The associated overheads are thoroughly
analyzed using several benchmarks
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