Concepts for High Availability in Scientific High-End Computing
Christian Engelmann, Steven L. Scott · 2005
Scientific high-end computing (HEC) has become an important tool for scientists world-wide to under-stand problems, such as in nuclear fusion, human ge-nomics and nanotechnology. Every year, new HEC sys-tems emerge on the market with better performance and higher scale. With only very few exceptions, the over-all availability of recently installed systems has been lower in comparison to the same deployment phase of their predecessors. In contrast to the experienced loss of availability, the demand for continuous availability has risen dramatically due to the recent trend towards capability computing. In this paper, we analyze the ex-isting deficiencies of current HEC systems and present several high availability concepts to counter the experi-enced loss of availability and to alleviate the expected impact on next-generation systems. We explain the ap-plication of these concepts to current and future HEC systems and list past and ongoing related research. This paper closes with a short summary of the presented work and a brief discussion of future efforts. 1.