Abstract
As system sizes increase, the amount of time in which an application can run without experiencing a failure decreases. Exascale applications will need to address fault tolerance. In order to support algorithm-based fault tolerance, communication libraries will need to provide fault-tolerance features to the application. One important fault-tolerance operation is distributed consensus. This is used, for example, to collectively decide on a set of failed processes. This paper describes a scalable, distributed consensus algorithm that is used to support new MPI fault-tolerance features proposed by the MPI 3 Forum’s fault-tolerance working group. The algorithm was implemented and evaluated on a 4,096-core Blue Gene/P. The implementation was able to perform a full-scale distributed consensus in 305 μs and scaled logarithmically.
This work was supported in part by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Anfinson, J., Luk, F.T.: A linear algebraic model of algorithm-based fault tolerance. IEEE Transactions on Computing 37, 1599–1604 (1988)
Buntinas, D.: Scalable distributed consensus to support MPI fault tolerance. Tech. Rep. ANL/MCS-TM-314, Argonne National Laboratory (June 2011)
Chen, Z., Dongarra, J.: Algorithm-based fault tolerance for fail-stop failures. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 19(12) (December 2008)
Chen, Z., Dongarra, J.: Highly scalable self-healing algorithms for high performance scientific computing. IEEE Transactions on Computers (July 2009)
Fault Tolerance Working Group: Run-though stabilization proposal, http://svn.mpi-forum.org/trac/mpi-forum-web/wiki/ft/run_through_stabilization
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Buntinas, D. (2011). Scalable Distributed Consensus to Support MPI Fault Tolerance. In: Cotronis, Y., Danalis, A., Nikolopoulos, D.S., Dongarra, J. (eds) Recent Advances in the Message Passing Interface. EuroMPI 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6960. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24449-0_39
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24449-0_39
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24448-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24449-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)