Multi-criteria Checkpointing Strategies: Response-Time versus Resource Utilization

Failures are increasingly threatening the efficiency of HPC systems, and current projections of Exascale platforms indicate that rollback recovery, the most convenient method for providing fault tolerance to general-purpose applications, reaches its own limits at such scales. One of the reasons explaining this unnerving situation comes from the focus that has been given to per-application completion time, rather than to platform efficiency. In this paper, we discuss the case of uncoordinated rollback recovery where the idle time spent waiting recovering processors is used to progress a different, independent application from the system batch queue. We then propose an extended model of uncoordinated checkpointing that can discriminate between idle time and wasted computation. We instantiate this model in a simulator to demonstrate that, with this strategy, uncoordinated checkpointing per application completion time is unchanged, while it delivers near-perfect platform efficiency.