Modeling coordinated checkpointing for large-scale supercomputers

Current supercomputing systems consisting of thousands of nodes cannot meet the demands of emerging high-performance scientific applications. As a result, a new generation of supercomputing systems consisting of hundreds of thousands of nodes is being proposed. However, these systems are likely to experience far more frequent failures than today´s systems, and such failures must be tackled effectively. Coordinated checkpointing is a common technique to deal with failures in supercomputers. This paper presents a model of a coordinated checkpointing protocol for large-scale supercomputers, and studies its scalability by considering both the coordination overhead and the effect of failures. Unlike most of the existing checkpointing models, the proposed model takes into account failures during checkpointing and recovery, as well as correlated failures. Stochastic activity networks (SANs) are used to model the system, and the model is simulated to study the scalability, reliability, and performance of the system.