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Fault Survivability of Lightweight Operating Systems for exascale

Ferreira, Kurt B.

Concern is growing in the High-Performance Computing community regarding the reliability of proposed exascale systems. Current research has shown that the expected reliability of these machines will greatly reduce their scalability. In constrast to current fault tolerance methods whose reliability focus is only the application, this project investigates the benefits integrating reliability mechcanisms in the operating system and runtime, as well as the appli- cation. More specifically, this project has three broad contributions in the field: First, using failure logs from current leadership-class high-performance computing systems, we outline the failures common on these large-scale systems. Second, we describe a novel memory pro- tection mechcanism capable of protecting common observed failures that uses the similarity inherrant in many OS and applications state, thereby reducing overheads. Finally, using an analogy with OS jitter, we develop a highly effecient simulator capable predicting the performance of resilience methods at the scales expected for future extreme-scale systems.