Impact of suboptimal checkpoint intervals on application efficiency

As computational clusters rapidly grow in both size and complexity, system reliability and, in particular, applica-tion resilience have become increasingly important factors to consider in maintaining efficiency and providing improved computational performance over predecessor systems. One commonly used mechanism for providing application fault tolerance in parallel systems is the use of checkpointing. By making use of a multi-cluster simulator, we study the impact of sub-optimal checkpoint intervals on overall appli-cation efficiency. By using a model of a 1926 node cluster and workload statistics from Los Alamos National Labora-tory to parameterize the simulator, we find that dramati-cally overestimating the AMTTI has a fairly minor impact on application efficiency while potentially having a much more severe impact on user-centric performance metrics such a queueing delay. We compare and contrast these results with the trends predicted by an analytical model