Soft fault detection and correction for multigrid. (November 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Altenbernd, Mirco; Göddeke, Dominik
• Other Names: Balaji Pavan guest-editor.; Leung Kai-Cheung guest-editor.; Huang Zhiyi guest-editor.; García-Blas Javier guest-editor.; Brown Christopher guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: International journal of high performance computing applications. Volume 32:Number 6(2018)
• Page Start: 897
• Page End: 912
• Publication Date: 2018-11
• Subjects: Fault tolerance -- resilience -- robust multigrid -- robust iterative solvers -- high-performance computing; High performance computing -- Periodicals; Supercomputers -- Periodicals; 004.1105
• DOI: 10.1177/1094342016684006
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1094-3420

Abstract

We introduce a novel algorithm-based fault-tolerance scheme to detect and repair soft transient faults (silent data corruption, bitflips) in multigrid solvers: by applying the full approximation scheme (FAS) variant of multigrid to linear systems, we prove invariants that enable fault detection and correction, and ultimately lead to a black-box protection of the smoothing stage. A statistical analysis for a wide range of prototypical problems demonstrates the efficiency of our approach, especially compared with full checksum protection. In particular, the overhead of our new method is negligible in the fault-free case, since we only employ readily available quantities.