Berkeley Lab Checkpoint/Restart (BLCR) for Linux Clusters
By Paul H. Hargrove, J. Duell. 2006
498 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article describes the motivation, design and implementation of Berkeley Lab Checkpoint/Restart (BLCR), a system-level checkpoint/restart implementation for Linux clusters that targets the space of typical High Performance Computing applications, including MPI. Application-level solutions, including both checkpointing and fault-tolerant algorithms, are recognized as more time and space efficient than system-level checkpoints, which cannot make use of any application-specific knowledge. However, system-level checkpointing allows for preemption, making it suitable for responding to ''fault precursors'' (for instance, elevated error rates from ECC memory or network CRCs, or elevated temperature from sensors). Preemption can also increase the efficiency of batch scheduling; for instance reducing idle cycles (by allowing for shutdown without any queue draining period or reallocation of resources to eliminate idle nodes when better fitting jobs are queued), and reducing the average queued time (by limiting large jobs to running during off-peak hours, without the need to limit the length of such jobs). Each of these potential uses makes BLCR a valuable tool for efficient resource management in Linux clusters.
Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Hardware and Architecture
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f2927d1ea7ff47361b24203ebf62658ffa42cbb
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In Computer Networks and Communications
In Hardware and Architecture
Citations in the corpus
- PLFS: a checkpoint filesystem for parallel applications (2009, background): “Berkeley Lab Checkpoint/Restart [15] and Condor Checkpointing [21] both allow unmodified applications to checkpoint the state of a single node.”
- DMTCP: Transparent checkpointing for cluster computations and the desktop (2007, background): “A crossover between these two categories is the kernel level checkpointer BLCR [13], [30].”