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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

CIFTS : A coordinated infrastructure for fault-tolerant systems.

Conference ·
OSTI ID:982645

In the next few years SciDAC applications will utilize petascale systems with tens to hundreds of thousands of processors, hundreds of I/O nodes, and thousands of disks. This leap of two orders of magnitude in scale from today's typical systems is causing a critical gap in fault management of these systems. The fault management issues for these emerging systems are well beyond the scope of today's common infrastructure and practice. Currently, systems software components for large-scale machines remain largely independent in their fault awareness and notification strategies. Faults can arise not just from the hardware but also from the OS, middleware, libraries, and application levels. Petascale applications that are evolving to utilize these platforms face many new challenges. With the CIFTS initiative, we aim to provide a coordinated infrastructure that will enable Fault Tolerant Systems to adapt to faults occuring in the operating environment in a holistic manner. Our approach will be to design a reference implementation of a fault awareness and notification backplane to provide common uniform event handling and notification mechanisms for fault-aware libraries and middleware; create an interface specification that allows libraries, run- time systems, and applications to connect to and use the fault-tolerance backplane; and extend key libraries and applications to validate the interface choices and to form the critical mass necessary for adoption in the community.

Research Organization:
Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)
Sponsoring Organization:
SC
DOE Contract Number:
AC02-06CH11357
OSTI ID:
982645
Report Number(s):
ANL/MCS/CP-64768
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
ENGLISH