The predicted reduced resiliency of next-generation high performance computers means that it will become necessary to take into account the effects of randomly occurring faults on numerical methods. Further, in the event of a hard fault occurring, a decision has to be made as to what remedial action should be taken in order to resume the execution of the algorithm. The action that is chosen can have a dramatic effect on the performance and characteristics of the scheme. Ideally, the resulting algorithm should be subjected to the same kind of mathematical analysis that was applied to the original, deterministic variant. The purpose of this work is to provide an analysis of the behaviour of the multigrid algorithm in the presence of faults. Multigrid is arguably the method of choice for the solution of large-scale linear algebra problems arising from discretization of partial differential equations and it is of considerable importance to anticipate its behaviour on an exascale machine. The analysis of resilience of algorithms is in its infancy and the current work is perhaps the first to provide a mathematical model for faults and analyse the behaviour of a state-of-the-art algorithm under the model. It is shown that the Two Grid Method fails to be resilient to faults. Attention is then turned to identifying the minimal necessary remedial action required to restore the rate of convergence to that enjoyed by the ideal fault-free method.
As we stride toward the exascale era, due to increasing complexity of supercomputers, hard and soft errors are causing more and more problems in high-performance scientific and engineering computation. In order to improve reliability (increase the mean time to failure) of computing systems, a lot of efforts have been devoted to developing techniques to forecast, prevent, and recover from errors at different levels, including architecture, application, and algorithm. In this paper, we focus on algorithmic error resilient iterative linear solvers and introduce a redundant subspace correction method. Using a general framework of redundant subspace corrections, we construct iterative methods, which have the following properties: (1) Maintain convergence when error occurs assuming it is detectable; (2) Introduce low computational overhead when no error occurs; (3) Require only small amount of local (point-to-point) communication compared to traditional methods and maintain good load balance; (4) Improve the mean time to failure. With the proposed method, we can improve reliability of many scientific and engineering applications. Preliminary numerical experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the new subspace correction method. The exponential growth of computational power of the extreme scale machines over the past few decades has led to a corresponding decrease in reliability and a sharp increase of the frequency of hardware faults. Our research focuses on the mathematical challenges presented by the silent hardware faults; i.e., faults that can perturb the result of computations in an inconspicuous way. Using the approach of selective reliability, we present an analytic fault mode that can be used to study the resilience properties of a numerical algorithm. We apply our approach to the classical fixed point iteration and demonstrate that in the presence of hardware faults, the classical method fails to converge in expectation. We preset a modified resilient algorithm that detects and rejects faults resulting in error with large magnitude, while small faults are negated by the natural self-correcting properties of the algorithm. We show that our method is convergent (in first and second statistical moments) even in the presenc...  Fault tolerant algorithms for the numerical approximation of elliptic partial differential equations on modern supercomputers play a more and more important role in the future design of exa-scale enabled iterative solvers. Here, we combine domain partitioning with highly scalable geometric multigrid schemes to obtain fast and fault-robust solvers in three dimensions. The recovery strategy is based on a hierarchical hybrid concept where the values on lower dimensional primitives such as faces are stored redundantly and thus can be recovered easily in case of a failure. The lost volume unknowns in the faulty region are re-computed approximately with multigrid cycles by solving a local Dirichlet problem on the faulty subdomain. Different strategies are compared and evaluated with respect to performance, computational cost, and speed up. Especially effective are strategies in which the local recovery in the faulty region is executed in parallel with global solves and when the local recovery is additionally accelerated. This results in an asynchronous multigrid iteration that can fully compensate faults. Excellent parallel performance on a current peta-scale system is demonstrated. The effectiveness of sparse, linear solvers is typically studied in terms of their convergence properties and computational complexity, while their ability to handle transient hardware errors, such as bit-flips that lead to silent data corruption (SDC), has received less attention. As supercomputers continue to add more cores to increase performance, they are also becoming more susceptible to SDC. Consequently, understanding the impact of SDC on algorithms and common applications is an important component of solver analysis. In this paper, we investigate algebraic multigrid (AMG) in an environment exposed to corruptions through bit-flips. We propose an algorithmic based detection and recovery scheme that maintains the numerical properties of AMG, while maintaining high convergence rates in this environment. We also introduce a performance model and numerical results in support of the methodology.