Publications of Torsten Hoefler

K. B. Ferreira, P. Widener, S. Levy, D. Arnold, Torsten Hoefler:

Understanding the Effects of Communication and Coordination on Checkpointing at Scale

(presented in New Orleans, LA, USA, Nov. 2014, Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC14) )

Abstract

Fault-tolerance poses a major challenge for future large-scale systems. Active research into coordinated, uncoordinated, and hybrid checkpointing systems has explored how the introduction of asynchrony can address anticipated scalability issues. However, few insights into selection and tuning of these protocols for applications at scale have emerged. In this paper, we use a simulation-based approach to show that local checkpoint activity in resilience mechanisms can significantly affect the performance of key workloads, even when less than 1% of a local node’s compute time is allocated to resilience mechanisms (a very generous assumption). Specifically, we show that even though much work on uncoordinated checkpointing has focused on optimizing message log volumes, local checkpointing activity may dominate the overheads of this technique at scale. Our study shows that local checkpoints lead to process delays that can propagate through messaging relations to other processes causing a cascading series of delays. We demonstrate how to tune hierarchical uncoordinated checkpointing protocols designed to reduce log volumes to significantly reduce these synchronization overheads at scale. Our work provides a critical analysis and comparison of coordinated and uncoordinated checkpointing and enables users and system administrators to fine-tune the checkpointing scheme to the application and system characteristics.

Documents

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BibTeX

@inproceedings{uncoordinated-cr-communication,
  author={K. B. Ferreira and P. Widener and S. Levy and D. Arnold and Torsten Hoefler},
  title={{Understanding the Effects of Communication and Coordination on Checkpointing at Scale}},
  year={2014},
  month={Nov.},
  location={New Orleans, LA, USA},
  note={Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC14)},
  source={http://www.unixer.de/~htor/publications/},
}


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