MPICH-V Project: A Multiprotocol Automatic Fault-Tolerant MPI

Abstract

High performance computing platforms such as Clusters, Grid and Desktop Grids are becoming larger and subject to more frequent failures. MPI is one of the most used message passing libraries in HPC applications. These two trends raise the need for fault-tolerant MPI. The MPICH-V project focuses on designing, implementing and comparing several automatic fault-tolerant protocols for MPI applications. We present an extensive related work section highlighting the originality of our approach and the proposed protocols. We then present four fault-tolerant protocols implemented in a new generic framework for fault-tolerant protocol comparison, covering a large spectrum of known approaches from coordinated checkpoint, to uncoordinated checkpoint associated with causal message logging. We measure the performance of these protocols on a micro-benchmark and compare them with the NAS benchmark, using an original fault tolerance test. Finally, we outline the lessons learned from this in depth fault-tolerant protocol comparison of MPI applications.