A study of the viability of exploiting memory content similarity to improve resilience to memory errors. (February 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Levy, Scott; Ferreira, Kurt B; Bridges, Patrick G; Thompson, Aidan P; Trott, Christian
• Is Part Of: International journal of high performance computing applications. Volume 29:Number 1(2015:Spring)
• Page Start: 5
• Page End: 20
• Publication Date: 2015-02
• Subjects: High-performance computing -- fault tolerance -- resilience; High performance computing -- Periodicals; Supercomputers -- Periodicals; 004.1105
• DOI: 10.1177/1094342014560354
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1094-3420

Abstract

Building the next-generation of extreme-scale distributed systems will require overcoming several challenges related to system resilience. As the number of processors in these systems grow, the failure rate increases proportionally. One of the most common sources of failure in large-scale systems is memory. In this paper, we propose a novel runtime for transparently exploiting memory content similarity to improve system resilience by reducing the rate at which memory errors lead to node failure. We evaluate the viability of this approach by examining memory snapshots collected from eight high-performance computing (HPC) applications and two important HPC operating systems. Based on the characteristics of the similarity uncovered, we conclude that our proposed approach shows promise for addressing system resilience in large-scale systems.