FFMK: A Fast and Fault-Tolerant Microkernel-Based System for Exascale Computing
Carsten Weinhold, Adam Lackorzyński, Jan Bierbaum, Martin Küttler, Maksym Planeta, Hannes Weisbach, Matthias Hille, Hermann Härtig, Alexander Margolin, Dror Sharf, Ely Levy, Pavel Gak, Amnon Barak, Masoud Gholami, Florian Schintke, Thorsten Schütt, Alexander Reinefeld, Matthias Lieber, Wolfgang E. Nagel · Lecture notes in computational science and engineering · 2020
The FFMK project designs, builds and evaluates a system-software architecture to address the challenges expected in Exascale systems. In particular, these challenges include performance losses caused by the much larger impact of runtime variability within applications, hardware, and operating system (OS), as well as increased vulnerability to failures. The FFMK OS platform is built upon a multi-kernel architecture, which combines the L4Re microkernel and a virtualized Linux kernel into a noise-free, yet feature-rich execution environment. It further includes global, distributed platform management and system-level optimization services that transparently minimize checkpoint/restart overhead for applications. The project also researched algorithms to make collective operations fault tolerant in presence of failing nodes. In this paper, we describe the basic components, algorithms, and services we developed in Phase 2 of the project.