Efficient and flexible fault tolerance and migration of scientific simulation using CUMULVS

摘要

CUMULVS is a middleware infrastructure for interacting with parallel scientific simulations to support online visualization and computational steering. The base CUMULVS system has been extended to provide a user-level mechanism for collecting checkpoints in a parallel simulation program. Via the same interface that CUMULVS uses to identify and describe data fields for visualization and parameters for steering, the user application can select the minimal program state necessary to restart or migrate an application task. The CUMULVS run-time system uses this information to efficiently recover fault-tolerant applications by restarting failed tasks. Application tasks can also be migrated -- even across heterogeneous architecture boundaries -- to achieve load balancing or to improve the task's locality with a required resource. This paper describes the CUMULVS interface for checkpointing, the issues faced in utilizing this interface when developing fault-tolerant and migrating applications, and the direction of future research in this area.