Research on Optimum Checkpoint Interval for Hybrid Fault Tolerance

Abstract

With the rapid growth of the high performance computer system size and complexity, passive fault tolerance can no longer effectively provide reliability of the system because of the high overhead and poor scalability of these methods. Hybrid fault tolerant method which is the combination of passive and active fault tolerant approaches has the potential to be widely used in fault tolerance of exascale system. However, there are still many issues of this method need to be ironed out. This paper focuses on the issues of checkpointing of hybrid fault tolerant method. A common question surrounding checkpointing is the optimization of the checkpoint interval. This paper proposes two models to model the systems which adopt hybrid fault tolerance. By comparing their results with the simulation, this paper evaluates the effectiveness of these two models. Experimental result shows that the modified model can not only predict the total work time excellently, but also can predict the optimum checkpoint interval precisely.