Performance Evaluation of Automatic Checkpoint-based Fault Tolerance for AMPI and Charm++

As the size of high performance clusters multiplies, the probability of system failure grows substantially, posing an increasingly significant challenge for scalability. Checkpoint-based fault tolerance methods are effective approaches at dealing with faults. With these methods, the state of the entire parallel application is checkpointed to reliable storage. When a fault occurs, the application is restarted from a recent checkpoint. However, the application developer is required to write significant additional code for checkpointing and restarting. This paper describes disk-based and memory-based checkpointing fault tolerance schemes that automate the task of checkpointing and restarting. The schemes also allow the program to be restarted on a different number of processors. These schemes are based on self-checkpointable, migratable objects supported by the Charm++ and Adaptive MPI (AMPI) run-time and can be applied to a wide class of applications written using MPI or message-driven languages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategies and evaluate their performance.

Gengbin Zheng and Chao Huang and Laxmikant V. Kale, "Performance Evaluation of 
Automatic Checkpoint-based Fault Tolerance for AMPI and Charm++", ACM SIGOPS 
Operating Systems Review: Operating and Runtime Systems for High-end Computing 
Systems, vol. 40, April 2006.

@ARTICLE{ftCompare06,
 author = "Gengbin Zheng and Chao Huang and Laxmikant V. Kal{\'e}",
 title = "{Performance Evaluation of Automatic Checkpoint-based Fault Tolerance for AMPI and Charm++}",
 journal = "ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review: Operating and Runtime Systems for High-end Computing Systems",
 volume = 40,
 number = 2,
 month = "April",
 year = 2006,
}