Performance Evaluation of Automatic Checkpoint-based Fault Tolerance for AMPI

As the size of high performance clusters multiplies, the prob-ability of system failure grows substantially, posing an in-creasingly significant challenge for scalability. Checkpoint-based fault tolerance methods are effective approaches at dealing with faults. With these methods, the state of the entire parallel application is checkpointed to reliable stor-age. When a fault occurs, the application is restarted from a recent checkpoint. However, the application developer is required to write significant additional code for checkpoint-ing and restarting. This paper describes disk-based and memory-based checkpointing fault tolerance schemes that automate the task of checkpointing and restarting. The schemes also allow the program to be restarted on a differ-ent number of processors. These schemes are based on self-checkpointable, migratable objects supported by the Adap-tive MPI (AMPI) and Charm++ run-time and can be ap-plied to a wide class of applications written using MPI or message-driven languages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategies and evaluate their performance. 1