Publications

Report for the ASC CSSE L2 Milestone (4873) - Demonstration of Local Failure Local Recovery Resilient Programming Model

Heroux, Michael A.; Teranishi, Keita T.

Recovery from process loss during the execution of a distributed memory parallel application is presently achieved by restarting the program, typically from a checkpoint file. Future computer system trends indicate that the size of data to checkpoint, the lack of improvement in parallel file system performance and the increase in process failure rates will lead to situations where checkpoint restart becomes infeasible. In this report we describe and prototype the use of a new application level resilient computing model that manages persistent storage of local state for each process such that, if a process fails, recovery can be performed locally without requiring access to a global checkpoint file. LFLR provides application developers with an ability to recover locally and continue application execution when a process is lost. This report discusses what features are required from the hardware, OS and runtime layers, and what approaches application developers might use in the design of future codes, including a demonstration of LFLR-enabled MiniFE code from the Matenvo mini-application suite.