The work reported in this paper is motivated towards validating an alternative approach for fault tolerance over traditional methods like checkpointing that constrain efficacious fault tolerance. Can agent intelligence be used to achieve fault tolerant parallel computing systems? If so, "What agent capabilities are required for fault tolerance?", "What parallel computational tasks can benefit from such agent capabilities?" and "How can agent capabilities be implemented for fault tolerance?" need to be addressed. Cognitive capabilities essential for achieving fault tolerance through agents are considered. Parallel reduction algorithms are identified as a class of algorithms that can benefit from cognitive agent capabilities. The Message Passing Interface is utilized for implementing an intelligent agent based approach. Preliminary results obtained from the experiments validate the feasibility of an agent based approach for achieving fault tolerance in parallel computing systems.
On an implementation level, checkpointing based fault tolerance has opened avenues for implementing middleware approaches that aim to add an additional interface or a sandwich layer between hardware and software layers @cite_25 . To improve efficiency of checkpointing, additional checkpointing strategies over custom implementations have been adopted in such middleware layers like MPI (Message Passing Interface), a few of which are referenced here.
@cite_25
2095487435 2155662278 2045879521 2069891156
A long-term trend in high-performance computing is the increasing number of nodes in parallel computing platforms, which entails a higher failure probability. Fault tolerant programming environments should be used to guarantee the safe execution of critical applications. Research in fault tolerant MPI has led to the development of several fault tolerant MPI environments. Different approaches are being proposed using a variety of fault tolerant message passing protocols based on coordinated checkpointing or message logging. The most popular approach is with coordinated checkpointing. In the literature, two different concepts of coordinated checkpointing have been proposed: blocking and nonblocking. However they have never been compared quantitatively and their respective scalability remains unknown. The contribution of this paper is to provide the first comparison between these two approaches and a study of their scalability. We have implemented the two approaches within the MPICH environments and evaluate their performance using the NAS parallel benchmarks. To be able to fully exploit ever larger computing platforms, modern HPC applications and system software must be able to tolerate inevitable faults. Historically, MPI implementations that incorporated fault tolerance capabilities have been limited by lack of modularity, scalability and usability. This paper presents the design and implementation of an infrastructure to support checkpoint restart fault tolerance in the Open MPI project. We identify the general capabilities required for distributed checkpoint restart and realize these capabilities as extensible frameworks within Open MPI's modular component architecture. Our design features an abstract interface for providing and accessing fault tolerance services without sacrificing performance, robustness, or flexibility. Although our implementation includes support for some initial checkpoint restart mechanisms, the framework is meant to be extensible and to encourage experimentation of alternative techniques within a production quality MPI implementation. As high performance clusters continue to grow in size and popularity, issues of fault tolerance and reliability are becoming limiting factors on application scalability. To address these issues, we present the design and implementation of a system for providing coordinated checkpointing and rollback recovery for MPI-based parallel applications. Our approach integrates the Berkeley Lab BLCR kernel-level process checkpoint system with the LAM implementation of MPI through a defined checkpoint restart interface. Checkpointing is transparent to the application, allowing the system to be used for cluster maintenance and scheduling reasons as well as for fault tolerance. Experimental results show negligible communication performance impact due to the incorporation of the checkpoint support capabilities into LAM MPI. As high-performance clusters continue to grow in size and popularity, issues of fault tolerance and reliability are becoming limiting factors on application scalability. We integrated one user-level checkpointing and rollback recovery (CRR) library to LAM MPI, a high performance implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI), to improve its availability. Compared with the current CRR implementation of LAM MPI, our work supports file checkpointing and own higher portability, which can run on more platforms including IA32 and IA64 Linux. In addition, the test shows that less than 15 performance overhead is introduced by the CRR mechanism of our implementation.