Scalable Fault Tolerance for MPI

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

based architecture to create layered approach to enabling scalable fault tolerance. The This project will focus on the middleware layer used to provide message passing capabilities for distributed memory applications. The system will use a component-design and implementation of the message passing system will provide sufficient flexibility to accommodate a wide variety of application state management and recovery mechanisms. The proposed message passing system will have the following capabilities. o Failure detection; o Fault tolerance of the run-time system; o Fault tolerance of the message passing layer (MPI); o Meaningful semantics for the message passing layer in the presence of faults; o Flexible application interface for fault notification; and o Support for application state management and recovery. This work will be realized as part of the component framework of LAM/MPI, an existing high-quality implementation of the Message Passing Interface standard. This project will have broader impacts in several areas. Availability of a scalable and reliable middleware layer will enable new levels of application scalability. In addition, new capabilities for MPI jobs can be realized, including process migration, non-stop behavior, and gang scheduling. Since the proposed middleware will be realized in the context of MPI, applications written with MPI can immediately benefit from this work. And, since the work will be integrated into a production-quality implementation of MPI, the results can actually be used by a widespread audience. The modular component-based design of our implementation will allow the middleware to be used by a wide variety of state management and application-specific fault tolerance schemes. Finally, important contributions from this work are in the form of interface designs-other implementations of MPI will also be able to adopt these approaches to provide reliability