Understanding and Exploiting Spatial Properties of System Failures on Extreme-Scale HPC Systems

Conference · Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2015

OSTI ID:1265444

Rogers, James H ^[1]; Maxwell, Don E ^[1]

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1. ORNL

As we approach exascale, the scientific simulations are expected to experience more interruptions due to increased system failures. Designing better HPC resilience techniques requires understanding the key characteristics of system failures on these systems. While temporal properties of system failures on HPC systems have been well-investigated, there is limited understanding about the spatial characteristics of system failures and its impact on the resilience mechanisms. Therefore, we examine the spatial characteristics and behavior of system failures. We investigate the interaction between spatial and temporal characteristics of failures and its implications for system operations and resilience mechanisms on large-scale HPC systems. We show that system failures have spatial locality at different granularity in the system; study impact of different failure-types; and investigate the correlation among different failure-types. Finally, we propose a novel scheme that exploits the spatial locality in failures to improve application and system performance. Our evaluation shows that the proposed scheme significantly improves the system performance in a dynamic and production-level HPC system.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1265444
• Resource Relation: Conference: IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), Rio de janeiro, Brazil, 20150622, 20150622
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English