High Performance Pipelined Process Migration with RDMA

—Coordinated Checkpoint/Restart (C/R) is a widely deployed strategy to achieve fault-tolerance. However, C/R by itself is not capable enough to meet the demands of upcoming exascale systems, due to its heavy I/O overhead. Process migration has already been proposed in literature as a pro-active fault-tolerance mechanism to complement C/R. Several popular MPI implementations have provided support for process migration, including MVAPICH2 and OpenMPI. But these existing solutions cannot yield a satisfactory performance. In this paper we conduct extensive profiling on several process migration mechanisms, and reveal that inefficient I/O and network transfer are the principal factors responsible for the high overhead. We then propose a new approach, Pipelined Process Migration with RDMA (PPMR), to overcome these overheads. Our new protocol fully pipelines data writing, data transfer, and data read operations during different phases of a migration cycle. PPMR aggregates data writes on t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CCGRID
• Authors: Xiangyong Ouyang, Raghunath Rajachandrasekar, Xavier Besseron, Dhabaleswar K. Panda
• Keywords: CCGRID 2011, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Process Migration, Process Migration Mechanisms, Target Node