Algorithm-based fault recovery of adaptively refined parallel multilevel grids

Abstract

On future extreme scale computers, it is expected that faults will become an increasingly serious problem as the number of individual components grows and failures become more frequent. This is driving the interest in designing algorithms with built-in fault tolerance that can continue to operate and that can replace data even if part of the computation is lost in a failure. For fault-free computations, the use of adaptive refinement techniques in combination with finite element methods is well established. Furthermore, iterative solution techniques that incorporate information about the grid structure, such as the parallel geometric multigrid method, have been shown to be an efficient approach to solving various types of partial different equations. In this article, we present an advanced parallel adaptive multigrid method that uses dynamic data structures to store a nested sequence of meshes and the iteratively evolving solution. After a fail-stop fault, the data residing on the faulty processor will be lost. However, with suitably designed data structures, the neighbouring processors contain enough information so that a consistent mesh can be reconstructed in the faulty domain with the goal of resuming the computation without having to restart from scratch. This recovery is based on a set of carefully designed distributed algorithms that build on the existing parallel adaptive refinement routines, but which must be carefully augmented and extended.