A Generic and High Performance Approach for Fault Tolerance in Communication Library

François Trahay (1) , Alexandre Denis (2, 3) , Yutaka Ishikawa (1)

1 CST - Computer Science Department
2 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
3 RUNTIME - Efficient runtime systems for parallel architectures

With the increase of the number of nodes in clusters, the probability of failures increases. In this paper, we study the failures in the network stack for high performance networks. We present the design of several fault-tolerance mechanisms for communication libraries to detect failures and to ensure message integrity. We have implemented these mechanisms in the N EW M ADELEINE communication library with a quick detection of failures in a portable way, and with fallback to available links when an error occurs. Our mechanisms ensure the integrity of messages without lowering too much the networking performance. Our evaluation show that ensuring fault-tolerance does not impact significantly the performance of most applications.

Keywords: NewMadeleine; MPI; MadMPI; pioman

Domains: Networking and Internet Architecture [cs.NI]

François Trahay, Alexandre Denis, Yutaka Ishikawa. A Generic and High Performance Approach for Fault Tolerance in Communication Library. [Research Report] INRIA Bordeaux. 2010. ⟨hal-00793176⟩