A Scalable Checkpoint Encoding Algorithm for Diskless Checkpointing

• Published in: 2008 11th IEEE High Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium pp. 71 - 79
• Main Authors: Zizhong Chen, Dongarra, J.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.12.2008
• Subjects: Bandwidth; Checkpoint; Checkpointing; Contracts; Delay; diskless checkpointing; Encoding; Fault tolerance; High performance computing; parallel and distributed systems; Reed-Solomon encoding; Scalability; Systems engineering and theory; USA Councils
• ISBN: 0769534821; 9780769534824
• ISSN: 1530-2059
• DOI: 10.1109/HASE.2008.13

Diskless checkpointing is an efficient technique to save the state of a long running application in a distributed environment without relying on stable storage. In this paper, we introduce several scalable encoding strategies into diskless checkpointing and reduce the overhead to survive k failures in p processes from 2[logp].k((beta + 2gamma)m + alpha) to (1 + O(1/radic(m))).k(beta + 2gamma)m, where a is the communication latency, 1/beta is the network bandwidth between processes, 1/gamma is the rate to perform calculations, and m is the size of local checkpoint per process. The introduced algorithm is scalable in the sense that the overhead to survive k failures in p processes does not increase as the number of processes p increases. We evaluate the performance overhead of the introduced algorithm by using a preconditioned conjugate gradient equation solver as an example. Experimental results demonstrate that the introduced techniques are highly scalable.