Analyzing Checkpointing Trends for Applications on the IBM Blue Gene/P System

Current petascale systems have tens of thousands of hardware components and complex system software stacks, which increase the probability of faults occurring during the lifetime of a process. Checkpointing has been a popular method of providing fault tolerance in high-end systems. While considerable research has been done to optimize checkpointing, in practice the method still involves a high-cost overhead for users. In this paper, we study the checkpointing overhead seen by applications running on leadership-class machines such as the IBM Blue Gene/P at Argonne National Laboratory. We study various applications and design a methodology to assist users in understanding and choosing checkpointing frequency and reducing the overhead incurred. In particular, we study three popular applications--the Grid-Based Projector-Augmented Wave application, the Carr-Parrinello Molecular Dynamics application, and a Nek5000 computational fluid dynamics application--and analyze their memory usage and...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICPPW
• Authors: Harish Gapanati Naik, Rinku Gupta, Pete Beckman
• Keywords: Checkpointing, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Dynamics Application, ICPPW 2009