Section: New Results

A Failure Detector for HPC Platforms

Participants : George Bosilca [ICL, University of Tennessee Knoxville, USA] , Aurélien Bouteiller [ICL, University of Tennessee Knoxville, USA] , Amina Guermouche [Telecom SudParis, France] , Thomas Hérault [ICL, University of Tennessee Knoxville, USA] , Yves Robert, Pierre Sens [LIP6, Université Paris 6, France] .

Building an infrastructure for exascale applications requires, in addition to many other key components, a stable and efficient failure detector. This work describes the design and evaluation of a robust failure detector, that can maintain and distribute the correct list of alive resources within proven and scalable bounds. The detection and distribution of the fault information follow different overlay topologies that together guarantee minimal disturbance to the applications. A virtual observation ring minimizes the overhead by allowing each node to be observed by another single node, providing an unobtrusive behavior. The propagation stage is using a non uniform variant of a reliable broadcast over a circulant graph overlay network, and guarantees a logarithmic fault propagation. Extensive simulations, together with experiments on the Titan ORNL supercomputer, show that the algorithm performs extremely well and exhibits all the desired properties of an exascale-ready algorithm.

This work is available as a research report and has been accepted for publication in the IJHPCA journal. A preliminary version appears in the proceedings of the SC'16 conference.