Understanding the Propagation of Transient Errors in HPC Applications

RA Ashraf and R Gioiosa and G Kestor and RF DeMara and CY Cher and P Bose, PROCEEDINGS OF SC15: THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING, NETWORKING, STORAGE AND ANALYSIS (2015).

DOI: 10.1145/2807591.2807670

Resiliency of exascale systems has quickly become an important concern for the scientific community. Despite its importance, still much remains to be determined regarding how faults disseminate or at what rate do they impact HPC applications. The understanding of where and how fast faults propagate could lead to more efficient implementation of application-driven error detection and recovery. In this work, we propose a fault propagation framework to analyze how faults propagate in MPI applications and to understand their vulnerability to faults. We employ a combination of compiler-level code transformation and instrumentation, along with a runtime checker. Using the information provided by our framework, we employ machine learning technique to derive application fault propagation models that can be used to estimate the number of corrupted memory locations at runtime.

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