A Theoretic Representation of the Effects of Targeted Failures in HPC Systems

Abstract

High performance computing (HPC) systems are becoming the norm for daily use and care must be made to ensure that these systems are resilient. Recent contributions on resiliency have been from quantitative and qualitative perspectives where general system failures are considered. However, there are limited contributions dealing with the specific classes of failures that are directly related to cyber-attacks. In this chapter, the author uses the concepts of transition processes and limiting distributions to perform a generic theoretical investigation of the effects of targeted failures by relating the actions of the cyber-enemy (CE) to different risk levels in an HPC system. Special cases of constant attack strategies are considered where exact solutions are obtained. Additionally, a stopped process is introduced to model the effects of system termination. The results of this representation can be directly applied throughout the HPC community for monitoring and mitigating cyber-attacks.