Impact of sub-optimal checkpoint intervals on application efficiency in computational clusters

Jones, William M.; Daly, John T.; DeBardeleben, Nathan

doi:10.1145/1851476.1851509

Cited by 24 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…In [7], Daly studies periodic checkpointing policies for Exponentially distributed failures, generalizing the well-known bound obtained by Young [23]. Daly extended his work in [13] to study the impact of sub-optimal checkpointing periods. In [20], the authors develop an "optimal" checkpointing policy, based on the popular assumption that optimal checkpointing must be periodic.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 94%

Using Replication for Resilience on Exascale Systems

Casanova

Vivien

Zaidouni

2015

Computer Communications and Networks

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High performance computing applications must be tolerant to faults, which are common occurrences especially in post-petascale settings. The traditional fault-tolerance solution is checkpoint-rollback, by which the application saves its state to secondary storage throughout execution and recover from the latest saved state in case of a failure. An oft studied research question is that of the optimal checkpointing strategy: when should checkpoints be saved. Unfortunately, even using an optimal checkpointing strategy, the frequency of checkpointing must increase as platform scale increases, leading to higher checkpointing overhead. This overhead precludes high parallel efficiency for large-scale platforms, thus mandating other more scalable fault-tolerance mechanisms. One such mechanism is replication, which can be used in addition to checkpoint-rollback. Using replication, multiple processors perform the same computation so that a processor failure does not necessarily mean application failure. While at first glance replication may seem wasteful, it may be significantly more efficient than using solely checkpointrollback at large scale. In this work we investigate two approaches for replication. In the first approach, each process in a single instance of a parallel application is (transparently) replicated. In the second approach, entire application instances are replicated. We provide a theoretical study of these two approaches, comparing them to checkpoint-rollback only, in terms of expected application execution time.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 94%

Using Replication for Resilience on Exascale Systems

Casanova

Vivien

Zaidouni

2015

Computer Communications and Networks

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“…In [10], Daly studies periodic checkpointing for Exponential failures, generalizing the well-known bound obtained by Young [11]. In [12] he studies the impact of sub-optimal checkpointing periods. In [13], Venkatesh develops an ''optimal'' checkpointing policy, based on the popular assumption that optimal checkpointing must be periodic.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 95%

On the impact of process replication on executions of large-scale parallel applications with coordinated checkpointing

Casanova

Robert

Vivien

et al. 2015

Future Generation Computer Systems

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International audienceProcessor failures in post-petascale parallel computing platforms are common occurrences. The traditional fault-tolerance solution, checkpoint-rollback-recovery, severely limits parallel efficiency. One solution is to replicate application processes so that a processor failure does not necessarily imply an application failure. Process replication, combined with checkpoint-rollback-recovery, has been recently advocated. We first derive novel theoretical results for Exponential failure distributions, namely exact values for the Mean Number of Failures To Interruption and the Mean Time To Interruption. We then extend these results to arbitrary failure distributions, obtaining closed-form solutions for Weibull distributions. Finally, we evaluate process replica-tion in simulation using both synthetic and real-world failure traces so as to quantify average application makespan. One interesting result from these experiments is that, when process repli-cation is used, application performance is not sensitive to the checkpointing period, provided that that period is within a large neighborhood of the optimal period. More generally, our empirical results make it possible to identify regimes in which process replication is beneficial

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“…Another drawback is the burden placed on the I/O infrastructure, since the checkpoint I/O may actually interfere with communication and I/O of other applications. The impact of suboptimal checkpoint intervals is investigated in [68]. System-level checkpoint can also be used in production, with technologies such as BLCR [63].…”

Section: Checkpointingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward Exascale Resilience: 2014 update

Cappello

Geist

Gropp

et al. 2014

JSFI

101

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Resilience is a major roadblock for HPC executions on future exascale systems. These systems will typically gather millions of CPU cores running up to a billion threads. Projections from current large systems and technology evolution predict errors will happen in exascale systems many times per day. These errors will propagate and generate various kinds of malfunctions, from simple process crashes to result corruptions.The past five years have seen extraordinary technical progress in many domains related to exascale resilience. Several technical options, initially considered inapplicable or unrealistic in the HPC context, have demonstrated surprising successes. Despite this progress, the exascale resilience problem is not solved, and the community is still facing the difficult challenge of ensuring that exascale applications complete and generate correct results while running on unstable systems. Since 2009, many workshops, studies, and reports have improved the definition of the resilience problem and provided refined recommendations. Some projections made during the previous decades and some priorities established from these projections need to be revised. This paper surveys what the community has learned in the past five years and summarizes the research problems still considered critical by the HPC community.

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Impact of sub-optimal checkpoint intervals on application efficiency in computational clusters

Cited by 24 publications

References 6 publications

Using Replication for Resilience on Exascale Systems

Using Replication for Resilience on Exascale Systems

On the impact of process replication on executions of large-scale parallel applications with coordinated checkpointing

Toward Exascale Resilience: 2014 update

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