Checkpointing Exascale Memory Systems with Existing Memory Technologies
Nilmini Abeyratne, Hsing-Min Chen, Byoungchan Oh, Ronald Dreslinski, Chaitali Chakrabarti, Trevor Mudge · 2016
Building exascale supercomputers requires resilience to failing components such as processor, memory, storage, and network devices. Checkpoint/restart is a key ingredient in attaining resilience, but providing fast and reliable checkpointing is becoming more challenging as the amount of data to checkpoint and the number of components that can fail increase in exascale systems. To improve the speed of checkpointing, emerging non-volatile memory (phase change, magnetic, resistive RAM) have been proposed. However, using unproven memories to create checkpoints will only increase the design risk for exascale memory systems. In this paper, we show that exascale systems with hundreds of petabytes of memory can be constructed with commodity DRAM and SSD flash memory and that newer non-volatile memory are unnecessary, at least for the next generation.