Mitigation of failures in high performance computing via runtime techniques

Ni, Xiang

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/92798 Copy

Description

Title

Mitigation of failures in high performance computing via runtime techniques

Author(s)

Ni, Xiang

Issue Date

2016-07-12

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Kalé, Laxmikant V

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Kalé, Laxmikant V

Committee Member(s)

• Vaidya, Nitin
• Kramer, William
• Cappello, Franck

Department of Study

Computer Science

Discipline

Computer Science

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• runtime system
• fault tolerance
• silent data corruption
• hard error
• soft error
• solid state disk
• high performance computing

Abstract

As machines increase in scale, it is predicted that failure rates of supercomputers will correspondingly increase. Even though the mean time to failure (MTTF) of individual component is high, the large number of components significantly decreases the system MTTF. Meanwhile, the decreasing size of transistors has been critical to the increase in capacity of supercomputers. The smaller the transistors are, silent data corruptions (SDC) are likely to occur more frequently. SDCs do not inhibit execution, but may silently lead to incorrect results. In this thesis, we leverage runtime system and compiler techniques to mitigate a significant fraction of failures automatically with low overhead. The main goals of various system-level fault tolerance strategies designed in this thesis are: reducing the extra cost added to application execution while improving system reliability; automatically adjusting fault tolerance decisions without user intervention based on environmental changes; protecting applications not only from fail-stop failures but also from silent data corruptions. The main contributions of this thesis are development of a semi-blocking checkpoint protocol that overlaps application execution with fault tolerance operation to reduce the overhead of checkpointing, a runtime system technique for automatic checkpoint and restart without user intervention, a holistic framework (ACR) for automatically detecting and recovering from silent data corruptions and a framework called FlipBack that provides targeted protection against silent data corruption with low cost.

Graduation Semester

2016-08

Type of Resource

text

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/92798

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2016 Xiang Ni

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