Active/Active Replication for Highly Availalbe HPC System Services
- ORNL
- Tennessee Technological University
High performance computing (HPC) exploits multi-processor parallelism on a large scale in order to enable research in computational sciences in various areas, such as nanotechnology, quantum chemistry, nuclear fusion and astrophysics. Simulations of real-world problems using mathematical abstraction models allow scientists to gain knowledge without the need or the capability to perform physical experiments. Today's high performance computing systems have several reliability deficiencies resulting in availability and serviceability issues. Head and service nodes represent a single point of failure and control for an entire system as they render it inaccessible and unmanageable in case of a failure until repair, causing a significant downtime. This paper introduces two distinct replication methods (internal and external) for providing symmetric active/active high availability for multiple head and service nodes running in virtual synchrony. It presents a comparison of both methods in terms of expected correctness, ease-of-use and performance based on early results from ongoing work in providing symmetric active/active high availability for two HPC system services (TORQUE and PVFS metadata server). It continues with a short description of a distributed mutual exclusion algorithm and a brief statement regarding the handling of Byzantine failures. This paper concludes with an overview of past and ongoing work, and a short summary of the presented research.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); Center for Computational Sciences
- Sponsoring Organization:
- SC USDOE - Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 1003410
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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