Multi-Fault Tolerance for Cartesian Data Distributions

• Published in: International journal of parallel programming Vol. 41; no. 3; pp. 469 - 493
• Main Authors: Ali, Nawab, Krishnamoorthy, Sriram, Halappanavar, Mahantesh, Daily, Jeff
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01.06.2013; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Blocking; Computer Science; Failure; Fault tolerance; Faults; Handles; Linear algebra; Parallel processing; Parity; Processor Architectures; Processors; Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems; Sparsity; Studies; Theory of Computation; Data distribution; Fault tolerance; Checksums; Fault tolerant linear algebra
• ISSN: 0885-7458; 1573-7640
• DOI: 10.1007/s10766-012-0218-5

Faults are expected to play an increasingly important role in how algorithms and applications are designed to run on future extreme-scale systems. Algorithm-based fault tolerance is a promising approach that involves modifications to the algorithm to recover from faults with lower overheads than replicated storage and a significant reduction in lost work compared to checkpoint-restart techniques. Fault-tolerant linear algebra algorithms employ additional processors that store parities along the dimensions of a matrix to tolerate multiple, simultaneous faults. Existing approaches assume regular data distributions (blocked or block-cyclic) with the failures of each data block being independent. To match the characteristics of failures on parallel computers, we extend these approaches to mapping parity blocks in several important ways. First, we handle parity computation for generalized Cartesian data distributions with each processor holding arbitrary subsets of blocks in a Cartesian-distributed array. Second, techniques to handle correlated failures, i.e., multiple processors that can be expected to fail together, are presented. Third, we handle the colocation of parity blocks with the data blocks and do not require them to be on additional processors. Several alternative approaches, based on graph matching, are presented that attempt to balance the memory overhead on processors while guaranteeing the same fault tolerance properties as existing approaches that assume independent failures on regular blocked data distributions. Evaluation of these algorithms demonstrates that the additional desirable properties are provided by the proposed approach with minimal overhead.