Powered by OpenAIRE graph
Found an issue? Give us feedback
addClaim

Designing Network Failover and Recovery in MPI for Multi-Rail InfiniBand Clusters

Authors: S. Pai Raikar; Hari Subramoni; Krishna Chaitanya Kandalla; Jérôme Vienne; Dhabaleswar K. Panda 0001;

Designing Network Failover and Recovery in MPI for Multi-Rail InfiniBand Clusters

Abstract

The emerging trends of designing commodity based supercomputing systems have a severe detrimental impact on the Mean-Time-Between-Failures (MTBF). The MTBF for typical HEC installations is currently estimated to be between eight hours and fifteen days. Failures in the interconnect fabric account for a fair share of the total failures occurring in such systems. This will continue to degrade as system sizes become larger. Thus, it is highly desirable that next generation system architectures and software environments provide sophisticated network level fault-tolerance and fault resilient solutions. In the past few years, the number of cores on processors has increased dramatically. To make efficient use of these machines it is necessary to provide the required bandwidth to all the cores. To keep up with the multi-core trend, current generation supercomputers and clusters are designed with multiple network cards (rails) to provide enhanced data transfer capabilities. Besides providing enhanced performance, such multi-rail networks can also be leveraged to provide network level fault resilience. This paper presents a design for a failover mechanism in a multi-rail scenario, for handling network failures and their recovery without compromising on performance. In a general message passing scenario, whenever there is a network failure, the entire job aborts. Our design allows the job to continue even when a network failure occurs, by using the remaining rails for communication. Once the rail recovers from the failure, we also propose a protocol to re-establish connections on that rail and resume normal operations. We experimentally demonstrate that our implementation adds very little overhead and is able to deliver good performance which is comparable to that of the other rails running in isolation. We also show that the recovery is immediate and is associated with no additional overhead. We also depict sustenance and reliability of the design by running application benchmarks with permanent failures.

Related Organizations
  • BIP!
    Impact byBIP!
    selected citations
    These citations are derived from selected sources.
    This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
    1
    popularity
    This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
    influence
    This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
    Average
    impulse
    This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
Powered by OpenAIRE graph
Found an issue? Give us feedback
selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
1
Average
Average
Average
Upload OA version
Are you the author of this publication? Upload your Open Access version to Zenodo!
It’s fast and easy, just two clicks!