Run-Through Stabilization: An MPI Proposal for Process Fault Tolerance

Abstract

The MPI standard lacks semantics and interfaces for sustained application execution in the presence of process failures. Exascale HPC systems may require scalable, fault resilient MPI applications. The mission of the MPI Forum’s Fault Tolerance Working Group is to enhance the standard to enable the development of scalable, fault tolerant HPC applications. This paper presents an overview of the Run-Through Stabilization proposal. This proposal allows an application to continue execution even if MPI processes fail during execution. The discussion introduces the implications on point-to-point and collective operations over communicators, though the full proposal addresses all aspects of the MPI standard.

Special thanks to the MPI Forum and Fault Tolerance Working Group members that contributed to the run-through stabilization proposal. Their comments and insights continue to help strengthen the developing proposals targeted for inclusion in the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. Research sponsored by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research; Office of Science; Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract No. DE-AC05- 00OR22725 with UT-Battelle, LLC; U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357; U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract No. DEAC52- 07NA27344 by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; The ARRA / DoE - Early Career Research Program; and by award #CCF-0816909 from the National Science Foundation.