Coordinated Fault Tolerance for High Performance, Final Project Report.

摘要

The main purpose of the Center for the Improvement of Fault Tolerance in Systems has been to conduct research with a goal of providing end-to-end fault tolerance on a systemwide basis for applications and other system software. While fault tolerance has been an integral part of most high-end computing (HEC) system software developed over the past decade, it has been treated mostly as a collection of isolated stovepipes. Visibility and response to faults has typically been limited to the particular hardware and software subsystems in which they are initially observed. Little fault information is shared across subsystems, allowing little flexibility or control on a system-wide basis, making it practically impossible to provide cohesive end-to-end fault tolerance in support of scientific applications. As an example, consider faults such as communication link failures that can be seen by a middleware or network library but are not directly visible to the job scheduler, or consider faults related to node failures that can be detected by system monitoring software but are not inherently visible to the resource manager. If information about such faults could be shared by the middleware/network libraries or monitoring software, then other system software, such as a resource manager or job scheduler, could ensure that failed nodes or failed network links were excluded from further job allocations and that further diagnosis could be performed.