2021/12/20 by Anthony Skjellum, Skjellum, Anthony, Derek Schafer +1
Computer Science · Engineering · #Distributed #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques #Radiation Effects in Electronics #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2112.10814
openalex publication_date 2021/12/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Production MPI codes need checkpoint-restart (CPR) support. Clearly, checkpoint-restart libraries must be fault tolerant lest they open up a window of vulnerability for failures with byzantine outcomes. But, certain popular libraries that leverage MPI are evidently not fault tolerant. Nowadays, fault detection with automatic recovery without batch requeueing is a strong requirement for production environments. Thus, allowing deadlock and setting long timeouts are suboptimal for fault detection even when paired with conservative recovery from the penultimate checkpoint. When MPI is used as a communication mechanism within a CPR library, such libraries must offer fault-tolerant extensions with minimal detection, isolation, mitigation, and potential recovery semantics to aid the CPR's library fail-backward. Communication between MPI and the checkpoint library regarding system health may be valuable. For fault-tolerant MPI programs (e.g., using APIs like FA-MPI, Stages/Reinit, or ULFM), the checkpoint library must cooperate with the extended model or else invalidate fault-tolerant operation.