Proactive process-level live migration in HPC environments

  • Authors:
  • Chao Wang;Frank Mueller;Christian Engelmann;Stephen L. Scott

  • Affiliations:
  • North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC;Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN;Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

As the number of nodes in high-performance computing environments keeps increasing, faults are becoming common place. Reactive fault tolerance (FT) often does not scale due to massive I/O requirements and relies on manual job resubmission. This work complements reactive with proactive FT at the process level. Through health monitoring, a subset of node failures can be anticipated when one's health deteriorates. A novel process-level live migration mechanism supports continued execution of applications during much of processes migration. This scheme is integrated into an MPI execution environment to transparently sustain health-inflicted node failures, which eradicates the need to restart and requeue MPI jobs. Experiments indicate that 1-6.5 seconds of prior warning are required to successfully trigger live process migration while similar operating system virtualization mechanisms require 13-24 seconds. This self-healing approach complements reactive FT by nearly cutting the number of checkpoints in half when 70% of the faults are handled proactively.