Reliability-Aware Approach: An Incremental Checkpoint/Restart Model in HPC Environments

Abstract

For full checkpoint on a large-scale HPC system, huge memory contexts must potentially be transferred through the network and saved in a reliable storage. As such, the time taken to checkpoint becomes a critical issue which directly impacts the total execution time. Therefore, incremental checkpoint as a less intrusive method to reduce the waste time has been gaining significant attentions in the HPC community. In this paper, we built a model that aims to reduce full checkpoint overhead by performing a set of incremental checkpoints between two consecutive full checkpoints. Moreover, a method to find the number of those incremental checkpoints is given. Furthermore, most of the comparison results between the incremental checkpoint model and the full checkpoint model (Liu et al., 2007) on the same failure data set show that the total waste time in the incremental checkpoint model is significantly smaller than the waste time in the full checkpoint model.