检查点系统中进程地址空间的优化存储策略

机群系统的规模增大,部件增多,导致了机群的组合错误率也不断上升。节点失效使运行于机群节点上的作业面临中途失败,从而造成巨大的资源浪费,甚至导致大量的作业无法完成。检查点系统为节点提供了较好的容错性能,因此成为机群操作系统软件的重要组成部分。进程的地址空间是检查点系统需要记录的一部分重要内容,对它的存储效率直接影响检查点操作的性能。论文提出了两种检查点系统中进程地址空间的优化存储策略。其中组合式检查点文件写策略解决了并发写机制在应用内存接近物理内存时的性能突降问题,A-O(Access-Order)进程地址空间存储策略调整传统地址空间的存储顺序,使大内存应用的检查点操作性能得到了大幅度提升。在实验中,A-O进程地址空间存储策略最高可以将传统的存储策略的时间开销缩减至原来的50%。     

网络存储系统中多协议数据共享一致性问题的研究

网络的开放性和数据存储服务功能的多样性,使得网络存储设备必须使用多套数据访问协议为不同系统平台的客户端提供多样化的存储服务。如何确保使用不同协议共享网络存储设备的各个客户端能协同工作,也即保证多协议数据共享的一致性成为存储领域的一项关键技术和学术热点。文章系统地分析了网络数据共享中的同步和一致性问题,并提出了一套可扩展的分层式锁管理(ExtensibleHierarchicLockManagement)的解决方案。     

基于Lustre文件系统的MPI检查点系统实现技术与性能测试

基于协同式检查点的回卷恢复是在大规模并行计算机系统中得到采用的一项重要容错技术,其性能开销主要为协同协议和检查点映像存储所决定.描述了一个在MPICH2中实现的应用透明的并行检查点系统,相比已有的技术,该系统有以下特点：1）协同协议操作利用了并行应用的近邻通信特性,通过虚连接方法减少协议的处理开销;2）采用Lustre文件系统简化检查点映像文件管理的复杂性;3）通过并行I/O操作提高性能,优化检查点映像的存储过程.实际应用的测试表明,该检查点系统具有较小的运行时间开销和良好的可扩展性.     

支持网格的机群操作系统的设计

机群操作系统面临着网格计算对其提出的资源共享、协同工作和自治管理的挑战，现有的扁平机群操作系统不能够适应这种需求，提出了一种基于服务的机群操作系统DCOS，采用层次型结构和面向对象的设计思想，从多个角度为网络系统提供支持，讨论了远程过程调用、系统状态侦测、实时检查点、安全机制等主要关键技术。     

一种面向TTCN 3测试系统的共享内存管理框架*

为了提高TTCN-3测试组件间通信的性能,在基于TTCN-3的基础测试平台上设计并实现了一套支持动态切换内存管理策略的共享内存管理框架,并在该框架下实现了三套不同的共享内存分配和自动回收策略.框架能够根据系统运行时刻的共享内存统计特征在这些策略中选择性能预期最好的一套,并动态地将当前内存管理策略切换为该套方案.在基础测试平台上运行一系列并发测试用例表明,该框架能提升内存管理以及整个系统的平均性能.     

可恢复的软件DSM系统JIACKPT

软件DSM(distributed shared memory)系统在机群上构造了共享存储编程环境,结合了共享存储的易编程性和机群的可扩展性,引起了广泛的研究.由于软件DSM系统是一个分布式系统,系统失败风险大,需要实现容错技术以促进其实用化.利用用户级检查点技术,在支持域存储一致模型的软件DSM系统JIAJIA的基础上,设计并实现了一个可恢复的高可移植的软件DSM系统JIACKPT(JIAjia with ChecKPoinTing).由于采用适合软件DSM系统的强全局一致状态以及多种优化措施,JIACKPT易于实现且获得很好的性能.在一个8节点的PC机群上的应用测试表明,即使每分钟做一次检查点,大部分应用的检查点开销也小于10%.此外,JIACKPT还具有高可移植性.这些都表明JIACKPT已经成为一个比较实用的系统.     

一个基于通信系统支持的并行检查点系统

在大规模机群环境下，检查点和恢复机制是一种必不可少的容错技术。该文提出一种基于机群通信系统的可靠性机制，在不作全局同步的情况下获取通信系统全局状态的方法，并利用该方法实现了一个对应用程序透明的并行检查点系统。该系统通过底层通信系统的支持降低了并行检查点的实现复杂度和执行开销，适用于大规模机群应用。     

一种面向移动计算的低代价透明检查点恢复协议

移动计算系统中的检查点恢复协议面临着许多与传统分布式系统所不同的问题.在目前已出现的支持移动计算的检查点恢复机制中,基于建立全局一致的检查点的方法不能确保错误的独立恢复;基于m-MSS-m通信的消息日志方法其移动站之间交换的消息需通过移动基站的转发.提出了一种基于消息日志的支持移动站之间直接通信(m-m)的容错协议并给出了相应的算法及正确性证明.与m-MSS-m通信相比,m-m通信有利于降低信道冲突;减少消息传递延迟.仿真结果表明,所设计的协议比传统协议具有更小的无错误状态下引入负载和错误恢复时间.     

高效的机群监控信息采集模型

针对目前大规模机群监控系统性能和可用性存在的问题,提出了一种基于IEEE1394协议的机群监控信息采集模型.该模型根据IEEE1394特点,对IEEE1394节点管理模块进行详细分析,实现了用该模块进行监控信息采集,从而替换了Ganglia监控系统中用于监控信息采集的部分.实验结果表明,该模型降低了机群监控系统对机群系统产生的负载,有效地提高了监控信息的采集速率和机群监控系统的可用性.     

一种可靠可伸缩组通信系统设计与实现

组通信系统是支持一致性和容错的分布式协同系统中非常重要的组成部分.为了满足大规模协同应用的需求,文中采用了基于流言的协议与确定性协议组合的方法设计并实现了一种可靠可伸缩组通信系统SGCS.该系统主要包括可靠消息传输服务与组成员管理服务,其中基于流言的可靠多播协议和确定的消息恢复、流量控制、排序协议的组合,基于流言的失败检测协议与确定的视图一致化协议的组合以及乐观虚同步机制应用使系统具有良好的可伸缩性、可靠性和灵活性.     

一个适合大规模集群并行计算的检查点系统

分布式检查点系统是大规模并行计算系统容错的重要手段．协议开销和检查点映像存储成为困扰并行检查点系统可伸缩性的两大瓶颈．针对并行应用程序的执行特征和高性能集群的体系结构特点,C系统分别采用动态虚连接技术和分布存储检查点映像的方法来有效降低协同式检查点的开销,增强检查点系统的可伸缩性．初步测试结果表明,C系统的设计策略适合大规模并行计算的容错．     

Nonblocking checkpointing for optimistic parallel simulation: description and an implementation

Describes a nonblocking checkpointing mode in support of optimistic parallel discrete event simulation. This mode allows real concurrency in the execution of state saving and other simulation specific operations (e.g, event list update, event execution) with the aim of removing the cost of recording state information from the completion time of the parallel simulation application. We present an implementation of a C library supporting nonblocking checkpointing on a myrinet based cluster, which demonstrates the practical viability of this checkpointing mode on standard off-the-shelf hardware. By the results of an empirical study on classical parameterized synthetic benchmarks, we show that, except for the case of minimal state granularity applications, nonblocking checkpointing allows improvement of the speed of the parallel execution, as compared to commonly adopted, optimized checkpointing methods based on the classical blocking mode. A performance study for the case of a personal communication system (PCS) simulation is additionally reported to point out the benefits from nonblocking checkpointing for a real world application.     

面向大规模MPI程序的应用级checkpointing技术

应用级checkpointing是一种在大规模科学计算领域中备受关注的容错技术.但是应用级checkpointing技术要求用户决定哪些是需要保存的关键数据,这增加了用户的负担.介绍一个基于MPI并行程序活跃变量分析的源到源的预编译工具ALEC,它可用于辅助应用级checkpointing.在一个512处理器的Cluster系统上,对经过ALEC编译的5个Fortran/MPI应用进行了性能评测.结果表明,ALEC能够有效减小checkpoint的大小和应用级checkpointing保存和恢复的开销.     

Independent checkpointing in a heterogeneous grid environment

The EU-funded XtreemOS project implements an open-source grid operating system based on Linux. In order to provide fault tolerance and migration for grid applications, it integrates a distributed grid-checkpointing service called XtreemGCP. This service is designed to support various checkpointing protocols and different checkpointer packages (e.g. BLCR, LinuxSSI, OpenVZ, etc.) in a transparent manner through a uniform checkpointer interface. In this paper, we present the integration of a backward error recovery protocol based on independent checkpointing into the XtreemGCP service. The solution we propose is not checkpointer bound and thus can be transparently used on top of any checkpointer package.To evaluate the prototype we run it within a heterogeneous environment composed of single-PC nodes and a Single System Image (SSI) cluster. The experimental results demonstrate the capability of the XtreemGCP service to integrate different checkpointing protocols and independently checkpoint a distributed application within a heterogeneous grid environment. Moreover, the performance evaluation also shows that our solution outperforms the existing coordinated checkpointing protocol in terms of scalability.     

Accelerating incremental checkpointing for extreme-scale computing

Concern is beginning to grow in the high-performance computing (HPC) community regarding the reliability of future large-scale systems. Disk-based coordinated checkpoint/restart has been the dominant fault tolerance mechanism in HPC systems for the past 30 years. Checkpoint performance is so fundamental to scalability that nearly all capability applications have custom checkpoint strategies to minimize state and reduce checkpoint time. One well-known optimization to traditional checkpoint/restart is incremental checkpointing, which has a number of known limitations. To address these limitations, we describe libhashckpt, a hybrid incremental checkpointing solution that uses both page protection and hashing on GPUs to determine changes in application data with very low overhead. Using real capability workloads and a model outlining the viability and application efficiency increase of this technique, we show that hash-based incremental checkpointing can have significantly lower overheads and increased efficiency than traditional coordinated checkpointing approaches at the scales expected for future extreme-class systems.     

Modular Checkpointing for Atomicity

Transient faults that arise in large-scale software systems can often be repaired by re-executing the code in which they occur. Ascribing a meaningful semantics for safe re-execution in multi-threaded code is not obvious, however. For a thread to correctly re-execute a region of code, it must ensure that all other threads which have witnessed its unwanted effects within that region are also reverted to a meaningful earlier state. If not done properly, data inconsistencies and other undesirable behavior may result. However, automatically determining what constitutes a consistent global checkpoint is not straightforward since thread interactions are a dynamic property of the program.In this paper, we present a safe and efficient checkpointing mechanism for Concurrent ML (CML) that can be used to recover from transient faults. We introduce a new linguistic abstraction called stabilizers that permits the specification of per-thread monitors and the restoration of globally consistent checkpoints. Global states are computed through lightweight monitoring of communication events among threads (e.g. message-passing operations or updates to shared variables). Our checkpointing abstraction provides atomicity and isolation guarantees during state restoration ensuring restored global states are safe.Our experimental results on several realistic, multithreaded, server-style CML applications, including a web server and a windowing toolkit, show that the overheads to use stabilizers are small, and lead us to conclude that they are a viable mechanism for defining safe checkpoints in concurrent functional programs. Our experiments conclude with a case study illustrating how to build open nested transactions from our checkpointing mechanism.     

Optimization of checkpointing-related I/O for high-performance parallel and distributed computing

Checkpointing, the process of saving program/application state, usually to a stable storage, has been the most common fault-tolerance methodology for high-performance applications. The rate of checkpointing (how often) is primarily driven by the failure rate of the system. If the checkpointing rate is low, fewer resources are consumed but the chance of high computational loss is increased and vice versa if the checkpointing rate is high. It is important to strike a balance, and an optimum rate of checkpointing is required. In this paper, we analytically model the process of checkpointing in terms of mean-time-between-failure of the system, amount of memory being checkpointed, sustainable I/O bandwidth to the stable storage, and frequency of checkpointing. We identify the optimum frequency of checkpointing to be used on systems with given specifications thereby making way for efficient use of available resources and maximum performance of the system without compromising on the fault-tolerance aspects. Further, we develop discrete-event models simulating the checkpointing process to verify the analytical model for optimum checkpointing. Using the analytical model, we also investigate the optimum rate of checkpointing for systems of varying resource levels ranging from small embedded cluster systems to large supercomputers.

A model for error recovery with global checkpointing

The paper proposes a new technique for providing software fault tolerance in concurrent systems. It combines the traditional global checkpointing mechanism with the recovery block concept in order to come up with an easily implementable error recovery mechanism. This mechanism involves smaller overhead in case of moderate to high process interaction than the schemes considered in past, which are based upon the idea of local checkpointing. A model for computing the optimum checkpointing interval is also presented. A particular distribution is hypothesized for the coverage of the recovery, and the behavior of the model is studied in detail for this case.