A Failure Detector for HPC Platforms

TitleA Failure Detector for HPC Platforms
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsBosilca, G., A. Bouteiller, A. Guermouche, T. Herault, Y. Robert, P. Sens, and J. Dongarra
JournalThe International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
Volume32
Issue1
Pagination139–158
Date Published2018-01
Keywordsfailure detection, Fault tolerance, MPI
Abstract

Building an infrastructure for exascale applications requires, in addition to many other key components, a stable and efficient failure detector. This article describes the design and evaluation of a robust failure detector that can maintain and distribute the correct list of alive resources within proven and scalable bounds. The detection and distribution of the fault information follow different overlay topologies that together guarantee minimal disturbance to the applications. A virtual observation ring minimizes the overhead by allowing each node to be observed by another single node, providing an unobtrusive behavior. The propagation stage uses a nonuniform variant of a reliable broadcast over a circulant graph overlay network and guarantees a logarithmic fault propagation. Extensive simulations, together with experiments on the Titan Oak Ridge National Laboratory supercomputer, show that the algorithm performs extremely well and exhibits all the desired properties of an exascale-ready algorithm.

DOI10.1177/1094342017711505
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