Leveraging 3D PCRAM technologies to reduce checkpoint overhead for future exascale systems
Xiangyu Dong, Naveen Muralimanohar, Norman Paul Jouppi, Richard Kaufmann, Yuan Xie · 2009
The scalability of future massively parallel processing (MPP) systems is challenged by high failure rates. Current hard disk drive (HDD) checkpointing results in overhead of 25% or more at the petascale. With a direct correlation between checkpoint frequencies and node counts, novel techniques that can take more frequent checkpoints with minimum overhead are critical to implement a reliable exascale system. In this work, we leverage the upcoming Phase-Change Random Access Memory (PCRAM) technology and propose a hybrid local/global checkpointing mechanism after a thorough analysis of MPP systems failure rates and failure sources.