Coordinated checkpoint versus message log for fault tolerant MPI
by Pierre Lemarinier, Aurelien Bouteiller, Geraud Krawezik, Franck Cappello
International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking (IJHPCN), Vol. 2, No. 2/3/4, 2004

Abstract: Large clusters, high availability clusters and grid deployments often suffer from network, node or operating system faults and thus require the use of fault tolerant programming models. MPI is one of the most widely adopted programming models for high performance computing. There are several approaches for fault tolerance in an MPI environment. The automatic and transparent ones are based on either coordinated or uncoordinated checkpoint associated with a message log strategy. There are many protocols and optimisations for these approaches and several implementations have been made. However, few results of comparison between them exist. Coordinated checkpoint has the advantage of a very low overhead as long as the execution stays fault free. In contrast, uncoordinated checkpoint must be complemented by a message log protocol which adds a significant penalty for all message transfers even for fault free executions. The drawbacks of coordinated checkpoint are the synchronisation cost before the checkpoint, the synchronised checkpoint cost and the restart cost after a fault. Message log does not suffer from these problems, as it processes checkpoint and restart independently. These differences suggest that the best approach depends on the fault frequency. This paper investigates this question from a fair experimental protocol: we implement and test two protocols (coordinated checkpoint and pessimistic message log) on the same system and we compare them on a cluster according to the frequency of faults that are generated artificially. The main conclusion is that uncoordinated checkpoint is relevant for a large scale cluster from one fault every hour for applications with large dataset.

Online publication date: Thu, 02-Feb-2006

The full text of this article is only available to individual subscribers or to users at subscribing institutions.

 
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.

Pay per view:
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.

Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking (IJHPCN):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:

Username:        Password:          Forgotten your password?

Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.

If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com