Scalable transparent checkpoint-restart of global address space applications on virtual machines over infiniband

  • Authors:

  • Oreste Villa;Sriram Krishnamoorthy;Jarek Nieplocha;David M. Brown, Jr.

  • Affiliations:

  • PNNL, Richland, USA;PNNL, Richland, USA;PNNL, Richland, USA;PNNL, Richland, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Computing frontiers
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Checkpoint-Restart is one of the most used software approaches to achieve fault-tolerance in high-end clusters. While standard techniques typically focus on user-level solutions, the advent of virtualization software has enabled efficient and transparent system-level approaches. In this paper, we present a scalable transparent system-level solution to address fault-tolerance for applications based on global address space (GAS) programming models on Infiniband clusters. In addition to handling communication, the solution addresses transparent checkpoint of user-generated files. We exploit the support for the Infiniband network in the Xen virtual machine environment. We have developed a version of the Aggregate Remote Memory Copy Interface (ARMCI) one-sided communication library capable of suspending and resuming applications. We present efficient and scalable mechanisms to distribute checkpoint requests and to backup virtual machines memory images and file systems. We tested our approach in the context of NWChem, a popular computational chemistry suite. We demonstrated that NWChem can be executed, without any modification to the source code, on a virtualized 8-node cluster with very little overhead (below 3%). We observe that the total checkpoint time is limited by disk I/O. Finally, we measured system-size depended components of the checkpoint time on up to 1024 cores (128 nodes), demonstrating the scalability of our approach in medium/large-scale systems.