Detailed Modeling and Evaluation of a Scalable Multilevel Checkpointing System

Journal Article · Mon Sep 01 04:00:00 EDT 2014 · IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2013.100· OSTI ID:1225695

Mohror, Kathryn ^[1]; Moody, Adam ^[1]; Bronevetsky, Greg ^[1]; de Supinski, Bronis R. ^[1]

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1. Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

High-performance computing (HPC) systems are growing more powerful by utilizing more components. As the system mean time before failure correspondingly drops, applications must checkpoint frequently to make progress. But, at scale, the cost of checkpointing becomes prohibitive. A solution to this problem is multilevel checkpointing, which employs multiple types of checkpoints in a single run. Moreover, lightweight checkpoints can handle the most common failure modes, while more expensive checkpoints can handle severe failures. We designed a multilevel checkpointing library, the Scalable Checkpoint/Restart (SCR) library, that writes lightweight checkpoints to node-local storage in addition to the parallel file system. We present probabilistic Markov models of SCR's performance. We show that on future large-scale systems, SCR can lead to a gain in machine efficiency of up to 35 percent, and reduce the load on the parallel file system by a factor of two. In addition, we predict that checkpoint scavenging, or only writing checkpoints to the parallel file system on application termination, can reduce the load on the parallel file system by 20 × on today's systems and still maintain high application efficiency.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC52-07NA27344
• OSTI ID: 1225695
• Report Number(s): LLNL-JRNL--564721
• Journal Information: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems Journal Issue: 9 Vol. 25; ISSN 1045-9219
• Publisher: IEEE
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
evaluation
fault tolerance
measurement
modeling
simulation of multiple-processor systems