A 1 PB/s file system to checkpoint three million MPI tasks

Abstract

With the massive scale of high-performance computing systems, long-running scientific parallel applications periodically save the state of their execution to files called checkpoints to recover from system failures. Checkpoints are stored on external parallel file systems, but limited bandwidth makes this a time-consuming operation. Multilevel checkpointing systems, like the Scalable Checkpoint/Restart (SCR) library, alleviate this bottleneck by caching checkpoints in storage located close to the compute nodes. However, most large scale systems do not provide file storage on compute nodes, preventing the use of SCR.