<![CDATA[We have presented our paper on the scalable failure detection, "<a href="http://sc16.supercomputing.org/2016/09/21/sc16-announces-best-paper-nominees/">Failure Detection and Propagation in HPC System</a>" at SC'16.
Building an infrastructure for exascale applications requires, in addition to many other key components, a stable and efficient failure detector. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a robust failure detector, able to maintain and distribute the correct list of alive resources within proven and scalable bounds.
The detection and distribution of the fault information follow different overlay topologies that together guarantee minimal disturbance to the applications. A virtual observation ring minimizes the overhead by allowing each node to be observed by another single node, providing an unobtrusive behavior.
The propagation stage is using a non-uniform variant of a reliable broadcast over a circulant graph overlay network, and guarantees a logarithmic fault propagation. Extensive simulations, together with experiments on the ORNL Titan supercomputer, show that the algorithm performs extremely well and exhibits all the desired properties of an exascale-ready algorithm.
The slides presented by Yves are here and the paper is also available.
This failure detector is implemented in the ULFM 2.0, an effort that will soon become open to public.
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