A Lightweight Message Logging Scheme for Fault Tolerant MPI

摘要

This paper presents a new lightweight logging scheme for MPI to provide fault tolerance. Checkpointing recovery is the most widely used fault tolerance scheme for the distributed systems. However, all the processes should be rolled back and restarted even for a single process failure to preserve consistency. Message logging can be used so that the other processes can proceed unaffected by the failure. However, logging all the messages tends to be prohivitively expensive. We note that the applications programmed using MPI follow certain rules and not all of the messages need to be logged. Our logging scheme is based on this observation and only the absolutely necessary information is logged or piggybacked. As a result, it is possible to greately reduce the logging overhead using our scheme and the experimental results matched well with the expectation.