A portable and adaptable fault tolerance solution for heterogeneous applications

Abstract

Heterogeneous systems have increased their popularity in recent years due to the high performance and reduced energy consumption capabilities provided by using devices such as GPUs or Xeon Phi accelerators. This paper proposes a checkpoint-based fault tolerance solution for heterogeneous applications, allowing them to survive fail-stop failures in the host CPU or in any of the accelerators used. Besides, applications can be restarted changing the host CPU and/or the accelerator device architecture, and adapting the computation to the number of devices available during recovery. The proposed solution is built combining CPPC (ComPiler for Portable Checkpointing), an application-level checkpointing tool, and HPL (Heterogeneous Programming Library), a library that facilitates the development of OpenCL-based applications. Experimental results show the low overhead introduced by the proposal and prove its portability and adaptability benefits.