High performance linpack benchmark

Abstract

The probability that a failure will occur before the end of the computation increases as the number of processors used in a high performance computing application increases. For long running applications using a large number of processors, it is essential that fault tolerance be used to prevent a total loss of all finished computations after a failure. While checkpointing has been very useful to tolerate failures for a long time, it often introduces a considerable overhead especially when applications modify a large amount of memory between checkpoints and the number of processors is large. In this paper, we propose an algorithm-based recovery scheme for the High Performance Linpack benchmark (which modifies a large amount of memory in each iteration) to tolerate fail-stop failures without checkpointing. It was proved by Huang and Abraham that a checksum added to a matrix will be maintained after the matrix is factored. We demonstrate that, for the right-looking LU factorization algorithm, the checksum is maintained at each step of the computation. Based on this checksum relationship maintained at each step in the middle of the computation, we demonstrate that fail-stop process failures in High Performance Linpack can be tolerated without checkpointing. Because no periodical checkpoint is necessary during computation and no roll-back is necessary during recovery, the proposed recovery scheme is highly scalable and has a good potential to scale to extreme scale computing and beyond. Experimental results on the supercomputer Jaguar demonstrate that the fault tolerance overhead introduced by the proposed recovery scheme is negligible.