Using Rollback Avoidance to Mitigate Failures in Next-Generation Extreme-Scale Systems

High-performance computing (HPC) systems enable scientists to numerically model complex phenomena in many important physical systems. The next major milestone in the development of HPC systems is the construction of the first supercomputer capable executing more than an exaflop, 10^18 floating point operations per second. On systems of this scale, failures will occur much more frequently than on current systems. As a result, resilience is a key obstacle to building next-generation extreme-scale systems. Coordinated checkpointing is currently the most widely-used mechanism for handling failures on HPC systems. Although coordinated checkpointing remains effective on current systems, increasing the scale of today\u27s systems to build next-generation systems will increase the cost of fault tolerance as more and more time is taken away from the application to protect against or recover from failure. Rollback avoidance techniques seek to mitigate the cost of checkpoint/restart by allowing an application to continue its execution rather than rolling back to an earlier checkpoint when failures occur. These techniques include failure prediction and preventive migration, replicated computation, fault-tolerant algorithms, and software-based memory fault correction. In this thesis, I examine how rollback avoidance techniques can be used to address failures on extreme-scale systems. Using a combination of analytic modeling and simulation, I evaluate the potential impact of rollback avoidance on these systems. I then present a novel rollback avoidance technique that exploits similarities in application memory. Finally, I examine the feasibility of using this technique to protect against memory faults in kernel memory

Optimizing Lossy Compression Rate-Distortion from Automatic Online Selection between SZ and ZFP

With ever-increasing volumes of scientific data produced by HPC applications, significantly reducing data size is critical because of limited capacity of storage space and potential bottlenecks on I/O or networks in writing/reading or transferring data. SZ and ZFP are the two leading lossy compressors available to compress scientific data sets. However, their performance is not consistent across different data sets and across different fields of some data sets: for some fields SZ provides better compression performance, while other fields are better compressed with ZFP. This situation raises the need for an automatic online (during compression) selection between SZ and ZFP, with a minimal overhead. In this paper, the automatic selection optimizes the rate-distortion, an important statistical quality metric based on the signal-to-noise ratio. To optimize for rate-distortion, we investigate the principles of SZ and ZFP. We then propose an efficient online, low-overhead selection algorithm that predicts the compression quality accurately for two compressors in early processing stages and selects the best-fit compressor for each data field. We implement the selection algorithm into an open-source library, and we evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed solution against plain SZ and ZFP in a parallel environment with 1,024 cores. Evaluation results on three data sets representing about 100 fields show that our selection algorithm improves the compression ratio up to 70% with the same level of data distortion because of very accurate selection (around 99%) of the best-fit compressor, with little overhead (less than 7% in the experiments).Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, first revisio

Reliable and Energy Efficient MLC STT-RAM Buffer for CNN Accelerators

We propose a lightweight scheme where the formation of a data block is changed in such a way that it can tolerate soft errors significantly better than the baseline. The key insight behind our work is that CNN weights are normalized between -1 and 1 after each convolutional layer, and this leaves one bit unused in half-precision floating-point representation. By taking advantage of the unused bit, we create a backup for the most significant bit to protect it against the soft errors. Also, considering the fact that in MLC STT-RAMs the cost of memory operations (read and write), and reliability of a cell are content-dependent (some patterns take larger current and longer time, while they are more susceptible to soft error), we rearrange the data block to minimize the number of costly bit patterns. Combining these two techniques provides the same level of accuracy compared to an error-free baseline while improving the read and write energy by 9% and 6%, respectively

Indoor positioning with deep learning for mobile IoT systems

2022 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.The development of human-centric services with mobile devices in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) has opened the possibility of merging indoor positioning technologies with various mobile applications to deliver stable and responsive indoor navigation and localization functionalities that can enhance user experience within increasingly complex indoor environments. But as GPS signals cannot easily penetrate modern building structures, it is challenging to build reliable indoor positioning systems (IPS). Currently, Wi-Fi sensing based indoor localization techniques are gaining in popularity as a means to build accurate IPS, benefiting from the prevalence of 802.11 family. Wi-Fi fingerprinting based indoor localization has shown remarkable performance over geometric mapping in complex indoor environments by taking advantage of pattern matching techniques. Today, the two main information extracted from Wi-Fi signals to form fingerprints are Received Signal Strength Index (RSSI) and Channel State Information (CSI) with Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation, where the former can provide the average localization error around or under 10 meters but has low hardware and software requirements, while the latter has a higher chance to estimate locations with ultra-low distance errors but demands more resources from chipsets, firmware/software environments, etc. This thesis makes two novel contributions towards realizing viable IPS on mobile devices using RSSI and CSI information, and deep machine learning based fingerprinting. Due to the larger quantity of data and more sophisticated signal patterns to create fingerprints in complex indoor environments, conventional machine learning algorithms that need carefully engineered features suffer from the challenges of identifying features from very high dimensional data. Hence, the abilities of approximation functions generated from conventional machine learning models to estimate locations are limited. Deep machine learning based approaches can overcome these challenges to realize scalable feature pattern matching approaches such as fingerprinting. However, deep machine learning models generally require considerable memory footprint, and this creates a significant issue on resource-constrained devices such as mobile IoT devices, wearables, smartphones, etc. Developing efficient deep learning models is a critical factor to lower energy consumption for resource intensive mobile IoT devices and accelerate inference time. To address this issue, our first contribution proposes the CHISEL framework, which is a Wi-Fi RSSI- based IPS that incorporates data augmentation and compression-aware two-dimensional convolutional neural networks (2D CAECNNs) with different pruning and quantization options. The proposed model compression techniques help reduce model deployment overheads in the IPS. Unlike RSSI, CSI takes advantages of multipath signals to potentially help indoor localization algorithms achieve a higher level of localization accuracy. The compensations for magnitude attenuation and phase shifting during wireless propagation generate different patterns that can be utilized to define the uniqueness of different locations of signal reception. However, all prior work in this domain constrains the experimental space to relatively small-sized and rectangular rooms where the complexity of building interiors and dynamic noise from human activities, etc., are seldom considered. As part of our second contribution, we propose an end-to-end deep learning based framework called CSILoc for Wi-Fi CSI-based IPS on mobile IoT devices. The framework includes CSI data collection, clustering, denoising, calibration and classification, and is the first study to verify the feasibility to use CSI for floor level indoor localization with minimal knowledge of Wi-Fi access points (APs), thus avoiding security concerns during the offline data collection process

Resiliency in numerical algorithm design for extreme scale simulations

This work is based on the seminar titled ‘Resiliency in Numerical Algorithm Design for Extreme Scale Simulations’ held March 1–6, 2020, at Schloss Dagstuhl, that was attended by all the authors. Advanced supercomputing is characterized by very high computation speeds at the cost of involving an enormous amount of resources and costs. A typical large-scale computation running for 48 h on a system consuming 20 MW, as predicted for exascale systems, would consume a million kWh, corresponding to about 100k Euro in energy cost for executing 1023 floating-point operations. It is clearly unacceptable to lose the whole computation if any of the several million parallel processes fails during the execution. Moreover, if a single operation suffers from a bit-flip error, should the whole computation be declared invalid? What about the notion of reproducibility itself: should this core paradigm of science be revised and refined for results that are obtained by large-scale simulation? Naive versions of conventional resilience techniques will not scale to the exascale regime: with a main memory footprint of tens of Petabytes, synchronously writing checkpoint data all the way to background storage at frequent intervals will create intolerable overheads in runtime and energy consumption. Forecasts show that the mean time between failures could be lower than the time to recover from such a checkpoint, so that large calculations at scale might not make any progress if robust alternatives are not investigated. More advanced resilience techniques must be devised. The key may lie in exploiting both advanced system features as well as specific application knowledge. Research will face two essential questions: (1) what are the reliability requirements for a particular computation and (2) how do we best design the algorithms and software to meet these requirements? While the analysis of use cases can help understand the particular reliability requirements, the construction of remedies is currently wide open. One avenue would be to refine and improve on system- or application-level checkpointing and rollback strategies in the case an error is detected. Developers might use fault notification interfaces and flexible runtime systems to respond to node failures in an application-dependent fashion. Novel numerical algorithms or more stochastic computational approaches may be required to meet accuracy requirements in the face of undetectable soft errors. These ideas constituted an essential topic of the seminar. The goal of this Dagstuhl Seminar was to bring together a diverse group of scientists with expertise in exascale computing to discuss novel ways to make applications resilient against detected and undetected faults. In particular, participants explored the role that algorithms and applications play in the holistic approach needed to tackle this challenge. This article gathers a broad range of perspectives on the role of algorithms, applications and systems in achieving resilience for extreme scale simulations. The ultimate goal is to spark novel ideas and encourage the development of concrete solutions for achieving such resilience holistically.Peer Reviewed"Article signat per 36 autors/es: Emmanuel Agullo, Mirco Altenbernd, Hartwig Anzt, Leonardo Bautista-Gomez, Tommaso Benacchio, Luca Bonaventura, Hans-Joachim Bungartz, Sanjay Chatterjee, Florina M. Ciorba, Nathan DeBardeleben, Daniel Drzisga, Sebastian Eibl, Christian Engelmann, Wilfried N. Gansterer, Luc Giraud, Dominik G ̈oddeke, Marco Heisig, Fabienne Jezequel, Nils Kohl, Xiaoye Sherry Li, Romain Lion, Miriam Mehl, Paul Mycek, Michael Obersteiner, Enrique S. Quintana-Ortiz, Francesco Rizzi, Ulrich Rude, Martin Schulz, Fred Fung, Robert Speck, Linda Stals, Keita Teranishi, Samuel Thibault, Dominik Thonnes, Andreas Wagner and Barbara Wohlmuth"Postprint (author's final draft

Approximate Computing Survey, Part II: Application-Specific & Architectural Approximation Techniques and Applications

The challenging deployment of compute-intensive applications from domains such Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP), forces the community of computing systems to explore new design approaches. Approximate Computing appears as an emerging solution, allowing to tune the quality of results in the design of a system in order to improve the energy efficiency and/or performance. This radical paradigm shift has attracted interest from both academia and industry, resulting in significant research on approximation techniques and methodologies at different design layers (from system down to integrated circuits). Motivated by the wide appeal of Approximate Computing over the last 10 years, we conduct a two-part survey to cover key aspects (e.g., terminology and applications) and review the state-of-the art approximation techniques from all layers of the traditional computing stack. In Part II of our survey, we classify and present the technical details of application-specific and architectural approximation techniques, which both target the design of resource-efficient processors/accelerators & systems. Moreover, we present a detailed analysis of the application spectrum of Approximate Computing and discuss open challenges and future directions.Comment: Under Review at ACM Computing Survey

Toward Resilience and Data Reduction in Exascale Scientific Computing

Because of the ever-increasing execution scale, reliability and data management are becoming more and more important for scientific applications. On the one hand, exascale systems are anticipated to be more susceptible to soft errors ,e.g. silent data corruptions, due to the reduction in the size of transistors and the increase of the number of components. These errors will lead to corrupted results without warning, making the output of the computation untrustable. On the other hand, large volumes of highly variable data are produced by scientific computing with high velocity on exascale systems or advanced instruments, and the I/O time on storing these data is prohibitive due to the I/O bottleneck in parallel file systems. In this work, we leverage algorithm-based fault tolerance (ABFT) and error-bound lossy compression to tackle the two problems, in order to support efficient scientific computing on exascale systems.We propose an efficient fault tolerant scheme to tolerant soft errors in Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), one of the most important computation kernels widely used in scientific computing. Traditional redundancy approaches will at least double the execution time or resources, limiting the usage in practice because of the large overhead. Previous works on offline ABFT algorithms for FFT mitigate this problem by providing resilient FFT with lower overhead, but these algorithms fail to make progress in vulnerable environments with high error rates because they can only detect and correct errors after the whole computation finishes. We propose an online ABFT scheme for large-scale FFT inspired by the divide-and-conquer nature of the FFT computation. We devise fault tolerant schemes for both computational and memory errors in FFT, with both serial and parallel optimizations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach provides more timely error detection and recovery as well as better fault coverage with less overhead, compared to the offline ABFT algorithm.To alleviate the I/O bottleneck in the parallel file systems, we work on a prediction-based error-bounded lossy compressor to significantly reduce the size of scientific datasets while retaining the accuracy of the decompressed data, with adaptive prediction algorithms and compression models. We first propose a regression-based predictor for better prediction accuracy than traditional approaches under large error bounds, followed by an adaptive algorithm that dynamically selects between the traditional Lorenzo predictor and the proposed regression-based predictor, leading to very high compression ratios with little visual distortion. We further unify the prediction-based model and transform-baed model by using transform-based compressors as a predictor, with novel optimizations toward efficient coefficient encoding for both the two models. The proposed adaptive multi-algorithm design provides better compression ratios given the same distortion, significantly reducing storage requirements and I/O time.We further adapt the compression algorithms and compressors to different requirements and/or objectives in realistic scenarios. We leverage a logarithmic transform to precondition the data, which turns a relative-error-bound compression problem into an absolute-error-bound compression problem. This transform aligns two different error requirements while improving the compression quality, efficiently reducing the workload for compressor design. We also correlate the compression algorithm with system information to achieve better I/O performance compared to traditional single compressor deployment. These studies further improve the efficiency of lossy compression from the perspective of efficient I/O in the context of scientific simulation, making scientific applications running on exascale systems more efficient