Modeling and tolerating heterogeneous failures in large parallel systems

As supercomputers and clusters increase in size and complexity, system failures are inevitable. Different hardware components (such as memory, disk, or network) of such systems can have different failure rates. Prior works assume failures equally affect an application, whereas our goal is to provide failure models for applications that reflect their specific component usage. This is challenging because component failure dynamics are heterogeneous in space and time.

To this end, we study 5 years of system logs from a production high-performance computing system and model hardware failures involving processors, memory, storage and network components. We model each component and construct integrated failure models given the component usage of common supercomputing applications. We show that these application-centric models provide more accurate reliability estimates compared to general models, which improves the efficacy of fault-tolerant algorithms. In particular, we demonstrate how applications can tune their checkpointing strategies to the tailored model.