Resilience Summit 2008

Held in conjunction with the Los Alamos Computer Science Symposium (LACSS) 2008
Santa Fe, New Mexico October 15, 2008.
http://www.csm.ornl.gov/srt/conferences/ResilienceSummit

Recent trends in high-performance computing (HPC) systems have clearly indicated that future increases in performance, in excess of those resulting from improvements in single-processor performance, will be achieved through corresponding increases in system scale, i.e., using a significantly larger component count. As the raw computational performance of the world's fastest HPC systems increases from today's current tera-scale to next-generation peta-scale capability and beyond, their number of computational, networking, and storage components will grow from the ten-to-one-hundred thousand compute nodes of today's systems to several hundreds of thousands of compute nodes and more in the foreseeable future. This substantial growth in system scale, and the resulting component count, poses a challenge for HPC system and application software with respect to fault tolerance and resilience.

Furthermore, recent experiences on extreme-scale HPC systems with non-recoverable soft errors, i.e., bit flips in memory, cache, registers, and logic added another major source of concern. The probability of such errors not only grows with system size, but also with increasing architectural vulnerability caused by employing accelerators, such as FPGAs and GPUs, and by shrinking nanometer technology. Reactive fault tolerance technologies, such as checkpoint/restart, are unable to handle high failure rates due to associated overheads, while proactive resiliency technologies, such as preemptive migration, simply fail as random soft errors can't be predicted. Moreover, soft errors may even remain undetected resulting in silent data corruption.

The goal of the Workshop on Resiliency for Petascale HPC is to bring together experts in the area of fault tolerance and resiliency for high-performance computing from national laboratories and universities to present their achievements and to discuss the challenges ahead. The secondary goal is to raise awareness in the HPC community about existing solutions, ongoing and planned work, and future research and development needs. The workshop program consists of a series of invited talks by experts and a round table discussion.

Workshop general co-chairs:
Stephen L. Scott
Computer Science and Mathematics Division
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
scottsl@ornl.gov

Chokchai (Box) Leangsuksun
eXtreme Computing Research Group
Computer Science Program
Louisiana Tech University, USA
box@latech.edu
Program co-chairs:
Mihaela Paun
Mathematics and Statistics Program
Louisiana Tech University, USA
mpaun@latech.edu

Christian Engelmann
Computer Science and Mathematics Division
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
engelmannc@ornl.gov

7:30 - 8:15AM : Breakfast
8:15 - 8:30AM : Welcome
Stephen L. Scott, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
8:30 - 9:00AM : Resilience: Sacrificing Previous Convictions About Physical Laws
John T. Daly, Los Alamos National Laboratory
9:00 - 9:00AM : Failure in Supercomputers and Supercomputer Storage
Garth Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University / Panasas, Inc. [slides]
9:30 - 10:00AM : System-level Checkpoint/Restart with BLCR
Paul Hargrove, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [slides]
10:00 - 10:30AM : Coffee Break
10:30 - 11:00AM : Process-Level Fault Tolerance for Job Healing in HPC Environments
Stephen L. Scott, Oak Ridge National Laboratory [slides]
11:00 - 11:30AM : A coordinated infrastructure for Fault Tolerant Systems (CIFTS)
Rinku Gupta, Argonne National Laboratory [slides]
11:30 - 12:00AM : Towards Support for Fault Tolerance in the MPI Standard
Greg Koenig, Oak Ridge National Laboratory [slides]
12:00 - 1:30AM : Lunch Break
1:30 - 2:00PM : Studying Systems as Artifacts
Adam J. Oliner, Stanford University [slides]
2:00 - 2:30PM : Combining System Characterization and Novel Execution Models to Achieve Scalable Robust Computing
Jim Brandt, Sandia National Laboratory
2:30 - 3:00PM : Root Cause Analysis
Jon Stearley, Sandia National Laboratory [slides]
3:00 - 3:30PM : Coffee Break
3:30 - 4:00PM : Accurate Prediction of Soft Error Vulnerability of Scientific Applications
Greg Bronevetsky, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [slides]
4:00 - 4:30PM : Modular Redundancy in HPC Systems: Why, Where, When and How?
Christian Engelmann, Oak Ridge National Laboratory [slides]
4:30 - 5:00PM : Making Resilience a Reality Through a Resilience Consortium
James Elliott, Louisiana Tech University [slides]
5:00 - 5:30PM : Discussion & Closing