On Energy-efficient Checkpointing in High-throughput Cycle-stealing Distributed Systems
Matthew J. Forshaw, Andrew Stephen McGough, Nigel V. Thomas · 2014
Checkpointing is a fault-tolerance mechanism commonly used in High Throughput Computing (HTC) environments to allow the execution of long-running computational tasks on compute resources subject to hardware and software failures and interruptions from resource owners. With increasing scrutiny of the energy consumption of IT infrastructures, it is important to understand the impact of checkpointing on the energy consumption of HTC environments. In this paper we demonstrate through trace-driven simulation on real-world datasets that existing checkpointing strategies are inadequate at maintaining an acceptable level of energy consumption whilst reducing the makespan of tasks. Furthermore, we identify factors important in deciding whether to employ checkpointing within an HTC environment, and propose novel strategies to curtail the energy consumption of checkpointing approaches.