A scalable and extensible checkpointing scheme for massively parallel simulations

Kohl N, Hötzer J, Schornbaum F, Bauer M, Godenschwager C, Köstler H, Nestler B, Rüde U (2018)

Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2018

Journal

DOI: 10.1177/1094342018767736

Abstract

Realistic simulations in engineering or in the materials sciences can consume enormous computing resources and thus require the use of massively parallel supercomputers. The probability of a failure increases both with the runtime and with the number of system components. For future exascale systems, it is therefore considered critical that strategies are developed to make software resilient against failures. In this article, we present a scalable, distributed, diskless, and resilient checkpointing scheme that can create and recover snapshots of a partitioned simulation domain. We demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the checkpoint strategy for simulations with up to 40 billion computational cells executing on more than 400 billion floating point values. A checkpoint creation is shown to require only a few seconds and the new checkpointing scheme scales almost perfectly up to more than 260, 000 (2¹⁸) processes. To recover from a diskless checkpoint during runtime, we realize the recovery algorithms using ULFM MPI. The checkpointing mechanism is fully integrated in a state-of-the-art high-performance multi-physics simulation framework. We demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the method with a realistic phase-field simulation originating in the material sciences and with a lattice Boltzmann method implementation.

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Involved external institutions

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Kohl, N., Hötzer, J., Schornbaum, F., Bauer, M., Godenschwager, C., Köstler, H.,... Rüde, U. (2018). A scalable and extensible checkpointing scheme for massively parallel simulations. International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1094342018767736

MLA:

Kohl, Nils, et al. "A scalable and extensible checkpointing scheme for massively parallel simulations." International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (2018).

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