Mpich-v: Toward a scalable fault tolerant mpi for volatile nodes,” in SuperComputing 2002

Global Computing platforms, large scale clusters and fu-ture TeraGRID systems gather thousands of nodes for com-puting parallel scientific applications. At this scale, node failures or disconnections are frequent events. This Volatil-ity reduces the MTBF of the whole system in the range of hours or minutes. We present MPICH-V, an automatic Volatility tolerant MPI environment based on uncoordinated checkpoint / roll-back and distributed message logging. MPICH-V architec-ture relies on Channel Memories, Checkpoint servers and theoretically proven protocols to execute existing or new, SPMD and Master-Worker MPI applications on volatile nodes. To evaluate its capabilities, we run MPICH-V within a framework for which the number of nodes, Channels Mem-ories and Checkpoint Servers can be completely configured as well as the node Volatility. We present a detailed per-formance evaluation of every component of MPICH-V and its global performance for non-trivial parallel applications. Experimental results demonstrate good scalability and high tolerance to node volatility