Cooperative application/OS DRAM fault recovery

Abstract

Exascale systems will present considerable fault-tolerance challenges to applications and system software. These systems are expected to suffer several hard and soft errors per day. Unfortunately, many fault-tolerance methods in use, such as rollback recovery, are unsuitable for many expected errors, for example DRAM failures. As a result, applications will need to address these resilience challenges to more effectively utilize future systems. In this paper, we describe work on a cross-layer application / OS framework to handle uncorrected memory errors. We illustrate the use of this framework through its integration with a new fault-tolerant iterative solver within the Trilinos library, and present initial convergence results. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.