Tutorial: Fault-Tolerance for HPC - Theory and Practice

Resilience became a critical issue for large-scale platforms. This tutorial provides a comprehensive survey of fault-tolerant techniques for high-performance computing, with a fair balance between theory and practice. The tutorial is structured along four main topics:

(i) An overview of failure types (software/hardware, transient/fail-stop), and typical probability distributions (Exponential, Weibull, Log-Normal);

(ii) General-purpose techniques, including different flavors of checkpoint and rollback recovery protocols, replication, prediction and silent error detection;

(iii) Application-specific techniques, such as ABFT for grid-based algorithms or fixed-point convergence for iterative applications, user-level checkpointing in memory; and

(iv) Practical deployment of fault tolerant techniques with User Level Fault Mitigation (a proposed MPI standard extension). Relevant examples, based on ubiquitous computational solver routines, will be protected with a mix of checkpoint-restart and advanced recovery techniques in a hands-on session.

The tutorial is open to all SC'15 attendees who are interested in the current status, and expected promise of fault-tolerant approaches for scientific applications. There are no theoretical prerequisites: background will be provided for all protocols and probabilistic models. However, basic knowledge of MPI will be helpful for the hands-on session.

Join us in Austin and participate to the tutorial!