A study of the viability of exploiting memory content similarity to improve resilience to memory errors

Journal Article · Tue Dec 09 00:00:00 EST 2014 · International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/1094342014560354· OSTI ID:1111407

Levy, Scott ^[1]; Ferreira, Kurt B. ^[2]; Bridges, Patrick G. ^[1]; Thompson, Aidan P. ^[2]; Trott, Christian ^[2]

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1. Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM (United States)
2. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

Building the next-generation of extreme-scale distributed systems will require overcoming several challenges related to system resilience. As the number of processors in these systems grow, the failure rate increases proportionally. One of the most common sources of failure in large-scale systems is memory. In this paper, we propose a novel runtime for transparently exploiting memory content similarity to improve system resilience by reducing the rate at which memory errors lead to node failure. We evaluate the viability of this approach by examining memory snapshots collected from eight high-performance computing (HPC) applications and two important HPC operating systems. Based on the characteristics of the similarity uncovered, we conclude that our proposed approach shows promise for addressing system resilience in large-scale systems.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1111407
• Report Number(s): SAND-2013-8030J; 476178
• Journal Information: International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, Vol. 29, Issue 1; ISSN 1094-3420
• Publisher: SAGE
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING