Programmer-guided reliability for extreme-scale applications. (September 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bernholdt, David E; Elwasif, Wael R; Kartsaklis, Christos; Lee, Seyong; Mintz, Tiffany M
• Other Names: Bland Wesley guest-editor.; Erez Mattan guest-editor.; Hidalgo J Ignacio guest-editor.; Fernández de Vega Francisco guest-editor.; Mercier Guillaume guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: International journal of high performance computing applications. Volume 32:Number 5(2018)
• Page Start: 598
• Page End: 612
• Publication Date: 2018-09
• Subjects: Applications -- error detection -- fault tolerance -- resilience -- soft errors; High performance computing -- Periodicals; Supercomputers -- Periodicals; 004.1105
• DOI: 10.1177/1094342016667625
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1094-3420

Abstract

We present "programmer-guided reliability" (PGR) as a systematic conceptual approach to address the expected rise in soft errors in coming extreme-scale systems at the application level. The approach involves instrumentation of the application with code to detect data corruption errors. The location and nature of these error detectors are at the discretion of the programmer, who uses their knowledge and experience with the problem domain, the application, the solution algorithms, etc., to determine the most vulnerable areas of the code and the most appropriate ways to detect data corruption. To illustrate the approach, we provide examples of error detectors from four different benchmark-scale applications. We also describe a simple control framework that allows for runtime configuration of the error detectors without recompilation of the application, as well as dynamic reconfiguration during the execution of the application. Finally, we discuss a number of future directions building on the basic PGR approach, including the incorporation of some general error detectors into the programming environment in order to make them more easily usable by the programmer.