PartRePer-MPI: Combining Fault Tolerance and Performance for MPI Applications

Abstract: As we have entered Exascale computing, the faults in high-performance systems are expected to increase considerably. To compensate for a higher failure rate, the standard checkpoint/restart technique would need to create checkpoints at a much higher frequency resulting in an excessive amount of overhead which would not be sustainable for many scientific applications. Replication allows for fast recovery from failures by simply dropping the failed processes and using their replicas to continue the regular operation of the application. In this paper, we have implemented PartRePer-MPI, a novel fault-tolerant MPI library that adopts partial replication of some of the launched MPI processes in order to provide resilience from failures. The novelty of our work is that it combines both fault tolerance, due to the use of the User Level Failure Mitigation (ULFM) framework in the Open MPI library, and high performance, due to the use of communication protocols in the native MPI library that is generally fine-tuned for specific HPC platforms. We have implemented efficient and parallel communication strategies with computational and replica processes, and our library can seamlessly provide fault tolerance support to an existing MPI application. Our experiments using seven NAS Parallel Benchmarks and two scientific applications show that the failure-free overheads in PartRePer-MPI when compared to the baseline MVAPICH2, are only up to 6.4% for the NAS parallel benchmarks and up to 9.7% for the scientific applications.