Reducing the impact of soft errors on fabric-based collective communications

Abstract

Collective operations might have a big impact on the performance of scientific applications, specially at large scale. Recently, it has been proposed Fabric-based collectives to address some scalability issues caused by the OS jitter. However, soft errors are becoming the next factor that significantly might degrade collective's performance at scale. This paper evaluates two approaches to mitigate the negative effect of soft errors on Fabric-based collectives. These approaches are based on replicating multiple times the individual packets of the collective. One of them replicates packets through independent output ports at every switch (spatial replication), whereas the other only uses one output port but sending consecutively multiple packets through it (temporal replication). Results on a 1,728-node cluster showed that temporal replication achieves a 50% better performance than spatial replication in the presence of random soft errors. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.