High Availability for Ultra-Scale High-End Scientific Computing
Christian Engelmann, Stephen L. Scott · 2008
Ultra-scale architectures for scientific high-end computing with tens to hundreds of thousands of processors, such as the IBM Blue Gene/L and the Cray X1, suffer from availability deficiencies, which impact the efficiency of running computational jobs by forcing frequent checkpointing of applications. Most systems are unable to handle runtime system configuration changes caused by failures and require a complete restart of essential system services, such as the job scheduler or MPI, or even of the entire machine. In this paper, we present a flexible, pluggable and component-based high availability framework that expands today`s effort in high availability computing of keeping a single server alive to include all machines cooperating in a high-end scientific computing environment, while allowing adaptation to system properties and application needs.