SFT: scalable fault tolerance

ABSTRACT

In this paper we will present a new technology that we are currently developing within the SFT: Scalable Fault Tolerance FastOS project which seeks to implement fault tolerance at the operating system level. Major design goals include dynamic reallocation of resources to allow continuing execution in the presence of hardware failures, very high scalability, high efficiency (low overhead), and transparency---requiring no changes to user applications. Our technology is based on a global coordination mechanism, that enforces transparent recovery lines in the system, and TICK, a lightweight, incremental checkpointing software architecture implemented as a Linux kernel module. TICK is completely user-transparent and does not require any changes to user code or system libraries; it is highly responsive: an interrupt, such as a timer interrupt, can trigger a checkpoint in as little as 2.5μs; and it supports incremental and full checkpoints with minimal overhead---less than 6% with full checkpointing to disk performed as frequently as once per minute.

REFERENCES

• 1: Roberto Gioiosa , Jose Carlos Sancho , Song Jiang , Fabrizio Petrini, Transparent, Incremental Checkpointing at Kernel Level: a Foundation for Fault Tolerance for Parallel Computers, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing, p.9, November 12-18, 2005 [doi>10.1109/SC.2005.76]
• 2: Adolfy Hoisie , Olaf Lubeck , Harvey Wasserman , Fabrizio Petrini , Hank Alme, A General Predictive Performance Model for Wavefront Algorithms on Clusters of SMPs, Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 2000 International Conference on Parallel Processing, p.219, August 21-24, 2000
• 3: D. J. Kerbyson , H. J. Alme , A. Hoisie , F. Petrini , H. J. Wasserman , M. Gittings, Predictive performance and scalability modeling of a large-scale application, Proceedings of the 2001 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (CDROM), p.37-37, November 10-16, 2001, Denver, Colorado [doi>10.1145/582034.582071]
• 4: Juan Fernández Peinador, Fabrizio Petrini, and Eitan Frachtenberg. Achieving Predictable and Scalable Performance with BCS-MPI. In Beniamino di Martino, Jack Dongarra, Adolfy Hoisie, Laurence T. Yang, and Hans Zima, editors, Engineering the Grid: Status and Perspective. Nova Science, 2005. Available from http://hpc.pnl.gov/people/fabrizio/papers/bcs_book.pdf.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.5 Reliability
          Subjects: Fault-tolerance

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.1 Process Management
      D.4.4 Communications Management
          Subjects: Network communication
      D.4.5 Reliability
          Subjects: Checkpoint/restart

General Terms:
Design, Performance, Reliability