Abstract
As system sizes increase, the amount of time in which an application can run without experiencing a failure decreases. Exascale applications will need to address fault tolerance. In order to support algorithm-based fault tolerance, communication libraries will need to provide fault-tolerance features to the application. One important fault-tolerance operation is distributed consensus. This is used, for example, to collectively decide on a set of failed processes. This paper describes a scalable, distributed consensus algorithm that is used to support new MPI fault-tolerance features proposed by the MPI 3 Forum’s fault-tolerance working group. The algorithm was implemented and evaluated on a 4,096-core Blue Gene/P. The implementation was able to perform a full-scale distributed consensus in 305 μs and scaled logarithmically.
This work was supported in part by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Buntinas, D. (2011). Scalable Distributed Consensus to Support MPI Fault Tolerance. In: Cotronis, Y., Danalis, A., Nikolopoulos, D.S., Dongarra, J. (eds) Recent Advances in the Message Passing Interface. EuroMPI 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6960. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24449-0_39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24449-0_39
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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