Tolerating Silent Data Corruption in Opaque Preconditioners

We demonstrate algorithm-based fault tolerance for silent, transient data corruption in “black-box” preconditioners. We consider both additive Schwarz domain decomposition with an ILU(k) subdomain solver, and algebraic multigrid, both implemented in the Trilinos library. We evaluate faults that corrupt preconditioner results in both single and multiple MPI ranks. We then analyze how our approach behaves when then application is scaled. Our technique is based on a Selective Reliability approach that performs most operations in an unreliable mode, with only a few operations performed reliably. We also investigate two responses to faults and discuss the performance overheads imposed by each. For a non-symmetric problem solved using GMRES and ILU, we show that at scale our fault tolerance approach incurs only 22% overhead for the worst case. With detection techniques, we are able to reduce this overhead to 1.8% in the worst case.