1st workshop on fault-tolerance for HPC at extreme scale FTXS 2010

Abstract

With the emergence of many-core processors, accelerators, and alternative/heterogeneous architectures, the HPC community faces a new challenge: a scaling in number of processing elements that supersedes the historical trend of scaling in processor frequencies. The attendant increase in system complexity has first-order implications for fault tolerance. Mounting evidence invalidates traditional assumptions of HPC fault tolerance: faults are increasingly multiple-point instead of single-point and interdependent instead of independent; silent failures and silent data corruption are no longer rare enough to discount; stabilization time consumes a larger fraction of useful system lifetime, with failure rates projected to exceed one per hour on the largest systems; and application interrupt rates are apparently diverging from system failure rates.