Compiler-Enhanced Incremental Checkpointing

As modern supercomputing systems reach the peta-flop performance range, they grow in both size and complexity. This makes them increasingly vulnerable to failures from a variety of causes. Checkpointing is a popular technique for tolerating such failures in that it allows applications to periodically save their state and restart the computation after a failure. Although a variety of automated system-level checkpointing solutions are currently available to HPC users, manual application-level checkpointing remains by far the most popular approach because of its superior performance. This paper focuses on improving the performance of automated checkpointing via a compiler analysis for incremental checkpointing. This analysis is shown to significantly reduce checkpoint sizes (upto 78%) and to enable asynchronous checkpointing.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: LCPC
• Authors: Greg Bronevetsky, Daniel Marques, Keshav Pingali, Radu Rugina
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, LCPC 2007, Manual Application-level Checkpointing, Modern Supercomputing Systems, Peta-flop Performance Range