Improving the scalability of transparent checkpointing for GPU computing systems

As the number of nodes in a GPU computing system increases, checkpointing to a global file system becomes more time-consuming due to the I/O bottlenecks and network congestion. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a transparent and scalable checkpoint/restart mechanism for OpenCL applications, named Two-level CheCL. As its name implies, Two-level CheCL consists of two different checkpoint implementations, Local CheCL and Global CheCL. Local CheCL avoids checkpointing to the global file system by utilizing node´s local storage. Our experimental results show that Local CheCL can accelerate the checkpointing process by up to four times faster than a conventional checkpointing mechanism. We also implement Global CheCL, which utilizes a global file system, to make sure that we always have a global checkpoint file even in the case of a catastrophic failure. We discuss the performance of our proposed mechanism through an analysis with a two-level checkpoint model.