Transparent, Incremental Checkpointing at Kernel Level: a Foundation for Fault Tolerance for Parallel Computers

“…Researchers propose increment checkpoint techniques to reduce checkpoint overhead [2]- [9]. At present, there are two main techniques for incremental checkpoint.…”

Section: Checkpoint-restart Techniquesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These benchmarks are widely used to test the checkpoint system performance [2], [6]. In the whole experiment, checkpoints are triggered by a timer interrupt at regular intervals.…”

Section: Experiments Setupmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As it requires saving the entire application memory space, the checkpoint approaches introduce considerable system overhead. Researchers proposed incremental checkpointing techniques to partially mitigate this problem [2]- [4]. Incremental checkpointing techniques first record the entire memory space as an initial memory image, and then only record the modified memory between two consecutive checkpoints.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Understanding the Impact of BPRAM on Incremental Checkpoint

Lü

Wang

et al. 2013

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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SUMMARYExisting large-scale systems suffer from various hardware/software failures, motivating the research of fault-tolerance techniques. Checkpoint-restart techniques are widely applied fault-tolerance approaches, especially in scientific computing systems. However, the overhead of checkpoint largely influences the overall system performance. Recently, the emerging byte-addressable, persistent memory technologies, such as phase change memory (PCM), make it possible to implement checkpointing in arbitrary data granularity. However, the impact of data granularity on the checkpointing cost has not been fully addressed. In this paper, we investigate how data granularity influences the performance of a checkpoint system. Further, we design and implement a high-performance checkpoint system named AG-ckpt. AG-ckpt is a hybrid-granularity incremental checkpointing scheme through: (1) lowcost modified-memory detection and (2) fine-grained memory duplication. Moreover, we also formulize the performance-granularity relationship of checkpointing systems through a mathematical model, and further obtain the optimum solutions. We conduct the experiments through several typical benchmarks to verify the performance gain of our design. Compared to conventional incremental checkpoint, our results show that AG-ckpt can reduce checkpoint data amount up to 50% and provide a speedup of 1.2x-1.3x on checkpoint efficiency.

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“…Two fundamentally different approaches may be employed, namely page protection mechanisms or page-table dirty bits. Different implementation variants build on these schemes, such as the bookkeeping and saving scheme that, based on the dirty bit scheme, copies pages into a buffer [19].…”

Section: Memory Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proactive process-level live migration and back migration in HPC environments

Wang

Mueller

Engelmann

et al. 2012

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing

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As the number of nodes in high-performance computing environments keeps increasing, faults are becoming common place. Reactive fault tolerance (FT) often does not scale due to massive I/O requirements and relies on manual job resubmission.This work complements reactive with proactive FT at the process level. Through health monitoring, a subset of node failures can be anticipated when one's health deteriorates. A novel process-level live migration mechanism supports continued execution of applications during much of processes migration. This scheme is integrated into an MPI execution environment to transparently sustain health-inflicted node failures, which eradicates the need to restart and requeue MPI jobs. Experiments indicate that 1-6.5 seconds of prior warning are required to successfully trigger live process migration while similar operating system virtualization mechanisms require 13-24 seconds. This self-healing approach complements reactive FT by nearly cutting the number of checkpoints in half when 70% of the faults are handled proactively.

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Transparent, Incremental Checkpointing at Kernel Level: a Foundation for Fault Tolerance for Parallel Computers

Cited by 117 publications

References 23 publications

Deduplication Potential of HPC Applications’ Checkpoints

Deduplication Potential of HPC Applications’ Checkpoints

Understanding the Impact of BPRAM on Incremental Checkpoint

Proactive process-level live migration and back migration in HPC environments

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