CAREER: Rethinking HPC Resilience in the Exascale Era

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Resilience is one of the key exascale research challenges in high-performancecomputing (HPC). Due to much high error rates, exascale supercomputers couldmake little progress in computations, or might generate incorrect results due tofailures, rendering the exascale performance useless. Thechallenge is how to achieve a complete HPC resilience at exascale in a way thatdoes not increase the performance overhead, the power consumption, and thecomplexity of underlying hardware. To this end, this research project designsand develops low-cost hardware/software cooperative techniques for HPCresilience in the exascale era. This project involves four research goals: (1) low-cost soft error resiliencefor CPUs; intelligent compiler-architecture interaction can validate the lack oferrors and performs fine-grained recovery, thus eliminating SDC. (2)compiler-directed soft error resilience for commodity GPUs; it can remove thepower-hungry error-correcting code (ECC) logic from the GPU register fileswithout compromising their resilience. (3) lightweight nonvolatile memory (NVM)persistence; it can mitigate the overhead of traditional heavyweight HPCcheckpointing and support whole-system persistence for applications withoutirrevocable operations. (4) low-cost timing error resilience for aggressivevoltage scaling to maximize the energy-efficiency with program correctnessguarantee.The resulting artifacts and technologies are expected to contribute to thenation's competitiveness by addressing the challenge of building reliable HPCsystems. The research outcome impacts a broad range of any disciplines thatneed correct computation results thus requiring reliable computing systemscovering from embedded systems to HPC cloud. Consequently, use of the proposedtechniques will make the execution of current and emerging applications muchmore reliable, and therefore directly affect our way of life.There will be three types of data generated from this research project: (1)algorithms and models, (2) software prototype, (3) testing infrastructureincluding simulators and evaluation benchmarks and their traces, (4) educationalmaterials. All of our software tools will be open source and made available tothe public, laboratories and industry.