Accelerating Checkpoint Operation by Node-Level Write Aggregation on Multicore Systems

—Clusters and applications continue to grow in size while their mean time between failure (MTBF) is getting smaller. Checkpoint/Restart is becoming increasingly important for large scale parallel jobs. However, the performance of the Checkpoint/Restart mechanism does not scale well with increasing job size due to constraints within the file system. Furthermore, with the advent of multi-core architecture, the situation is aggravated due to larger number of processes running on the same node, trying to checkpoint simultaneously. This results in increased number of file writes at the time of checkpointing which leads to performance degradation. As a result, deployment of Checkpoint/Restart mechanisms for large scale parallel applications is limited. In this work, we explore the Checkpoint/Restart mechanism in MVAPICH2, which uses BLCR as the checkpointing library. Our profiling of the checkpoints for the NAS parallel benchmarks revealed a large number of small file writes interspers...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICPP
• Authors: Xiangyong Ouyang, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Dhabaleswar K. Panda
• Keywords: Checkpoint/restart Mechanism, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICPP 2009, Large Scale Parallel, file Writes