SHF: Small: Advanced Compiler Techniques for Meeting Fault Tolerance Needs of HPC Systems

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Making high performance applications resilient to failure of individual nodes is a major challenge today. Particularly, there is a need for reducing the overheads associated with checkpointing and for dealing with silent data corruption in an effective fashion. This project at Ohio State University is addressing these problems based on new insights and approaches. The work on improving the efficiency of checkpointing and restart is based on the following observation - current checkpointing protocols were developed in context of distributed computing, and do not exploit key properties seen in most scientific parallel programs. This project is developing static and dynamic analysis methods to determine what we refer to as the "message intent", which can then be used to allow automated application-level uncoordinated checkpointing, but without the need for message logging, keeping the checkpoint sizes small, and recovery low-cost. In addition, a distinct software approach for handling silent data corruption is being developed. The idea is to make the data structures that control what computation and/or communication occurs in the program resilient, by only replicating them and their storage. This introduces modest overheads, but guards against the most drastic impact of silent data corruption on program stability and correctness. This research will result in reducing overheads of making high performance systems resilient, which in turn will improve the efficiency and resource utilization.