Versioned distributed arrays for resilience in scientific applications: Global view resilience

A Chien, P Balaji, P Beckman, N Dun, A Fang… - Procedia Computer …, 2015 - Elsevier
Procedia Computer Science, 2015Elsevier
Exascale studies project reliability challenges for future high-performance computing (HPC)
systems. We propose the Global View Resilience (GVR) system, a library that enables
applications to add resilience in a portable, application-controlled fashion using versioned
distributed arrays. We describe GVR's interfaces to distributed arrays, versioning, and cross-
layer error recovery. Using several large applications (OpenMC, the preconditioned
conjugate gradient solver PCG, ddcMD, and Chombo), we evaluate the programmer effort to …
Abstract
Exascale studies project reliability challenges for future high-performance computing (HPC) systems. We propose the Global View Resilience (GVR) system, a library that enables applications to add resilience in a portable, application-controlled fashion using versioned distributed arrays. We describe GVR's interfaces to distributed arrays, versioning, and cross-layer error recovery. Using several large applications (OpenMC, the preconditioned conjugate gradient solver PCG, ddcMD, and Chombo), we evaluate the programmer effort to add resilience. The required changes are small (<2% LOC), localized, and machine-independent, requiring no software architecture changes. We also measure the overhead of adding GVR versioning and show that generally overheads <2% are achieved. We conclude that GVR's interfaces and implementation are flexible and portable and create a gentle-slope path to tolerate growing error rates in future systems.
Elsevier