A Scalable Double In-memory Checkpoint and Restart Scheme towards Exascale

As the size of supercomputers multiplies, the probability of system failure grows substantially, posing an increasingly significant challenge for scalability. It is important to provide resilience for long running applications. 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. In previous work, we have demonstrated an efficient double in-memory checkpoint and restart fault tolerance scheme, which leverages Charm++'s parallel objects for checkpointing. In this paper, we further optimize the scheme by eliminating sequential bottlenecks caused by serialized communication. We extend the in-memory checkpointing scheme to work on MPI communication layer, and demonstrate the performance on very large scale supercomputers. We run a million atom molecular dynamics simulation on up to 32k cores, the checkpoint times were in milliseconds. Even for large memory becnhamrks, such as a 5-point stencil with 128 MB per core at checkpoint, the checkpoint time was increased to about 1.4 seconds on 16k cores. The restart times were measured to be less than 0.4 seconds on 32k cores.

@techreport{inmem2012,
  author = {Gengbin Zheng and Xiang Ni and Esteban Meneses and Laxmikant Kale},
  title = {A Scalable Double In-memory Checkpoint and Restart Scheme towards Exascale},
  year = {2012},
  month = {Feburary},
  number	= "12-04",
  institution	= "Parallel Programming Laboratory"
}