Impact of Event Logger on Causal Message Logging Protocols for Fault Tolerant {MPI}

International audienceFault tolerance in MPI becomes a main issue in the HPC community. Several approaches are envisioned from user or programmer controlled fault tolerance to fully automatic fault detection and handling. For this last approach, several protocols have been proposed in the literature. In a recent paper, we have demonstrated that uncoordinated checkpointing tolerates higher fault frequency than coordinated checkpointing. Moreover causal message logging protocols have been proved the most efficient message logging technique. These protocols consist in piggybacking non deterministic events to computation message. Several protocols have been proposed in the literature. Their merits are usually evaluated from four metrics: a) piggybacking computation cost, b) piggyback size, c) applications performance and d) fault recovery performance. In this paper, we investigate the benefit of using a stable storage for logging message events in causal message logging protocols. To evaluate the advantage of this technique we implemented three protocols: 1) a classical causal message protocol proposed in Manetho, 2) a state of the art protocol known as LogOn, 3) a light computation cost protocol called Vcausal. We demonstrate a major impact of this stable storage for the three protocols, on the four criteria for micro benchmarks as well as for the NAS benchmark

FAIL-MPI: How fault-tolerant is fault-tolerant MPI ?

One of the topics of paramount importance in the development of Cluster and Grid middleware is the impact of faults since their occurrence probability in a Grid infrastructure and in large-scale distributed system is actually very high. MPI (Message Passing Interface) is a popular abstraction for programming distributed computation applications. FAIL is an abstract language for fault occurrence description capable of expressing complex and realistic fault scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using FAIL to inject faults in a fault-tolerant MPI implementation. Our middleware, FAIL-MPI, is used to carry quantitative and qualitative faults and stress testing

A taxonomy of task-based parallel programming technologies for high-performance computing

Task-based programming models for shared memory -- such as Cilk Plus and OpenMP 3 -- are well established and documented. However, with the increase in parallel, many-core and heterogeneous systems, a number of research-driven projects have developed more diversified task-based support, employing various programming and runtime features. Unfortunately, despite the fact that dozens of different task-based systems exist today and are actively used for parallel and high-performance computing (HPC), no comprehensive overview or classification of task-based technologies for HPC exists. In this paper, we provide an initial task-focused taxonomy for HPC technologies, which covers both programming interfaces and runtime mechanisms. We demonstrate the usefulness of our taxonomy by classifying state-of-the-art task-based environments in use today

Coordinated checkpoint versus message log for fault tolerant MPI

fault tolerant MP

Message Relaying Techniques for Computational Grids and their Relations to Fault Tolerant Message Passing for the Grid

Abstract. In order to execute without modification Message Passing distributed applications on a computational grid, one has to address many issues. The first to come is how let processes of two different clusters communicate. In this work, we study the performances of relaying techniques (passing messages to a middle-tier) to solve this issue. When using relays, messages and most of the nondeterministic behavior of nodes pass through the relays during the execution. This provides the ability to implement fault tolerance at the relay level using pessimistic message logging techniques. We also evaluate the overhead of this logging and study how relays should be designed and fault tolerance protocols composed to provide a full fault-tolerant Message Passing Interface library for computational grids.