@article {1459, title = {Fault Tolerance of MPI Applications in Exascale Systems: The ULFM Solution}, journal = {Future Generation Computer Systems}, volume = {106}, year = {2020}, month = {2020-05}, pages = { 467-481}, abstract = {The growth in the number of computational resources used by high-performance computing (HPC) systems leads to an increase in failure rates. Fault-tolerant techniques will become essential for long-running applications executing in future exascale systems, not only to ensure the completion of their execution in these systems but also to improve their energy consumption. Although the Message Passing Interface (MPI) is the most popular programming model for distributed-memory HPC systems, as of now, it does not provide any fault-tolerant construct for users to handle failures. Thus, the recovery procedure is postponed until the application is aborted and re-spawned. The proposal of the User Level Failure Mitigation (ULFM) interface in the MPI forum provides new opportunities in this field, enabling the implementation of resilient MPI applications, system runtimes, and programming language constructs able to detect and react to failures without aborting their execution. This paper presents a global overview of the resilience interfaces provided by the ULFM specification, covers archetypal usage patterns and building blocks, and surveys the wide variety of application-driven solutions that have exploited them in recent years. The large and varied number of approaches in the literature proves that ULFM provides the necessary flexibility to implement efficient fault-tolerant MPI applications. All the proposed solutions are based on application-driven recovery mechanisms, which allows reducing the overhead and obtaining the required level of efficiency needed in the future exascale platforms.}, keywords = {Application-level checkpointing, MPI, resilience, ULFM}, issn = {0167-739X}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2020.01.026}, url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167739X1930860X}, author = {Nuria Losada and Patricia Gonz{\'a}lez and Mar{\'\i}a J. Mart{\'\i}n and George Bosilca and Aurelien Bouteiller and Keita Teranishi} } @techreport {872, title = {Practical Scalable Consensus for Pseudo-Synchronous Distributed Systems: Formal Proof}, journal = {Innovative Computing Laboratory Technical Report}, number = {ICL-UT-15-01}, year = {2015}, month = {2015-04}, author = {Thomas Herault and Aurelien Bouteiller and George Bosilca and Marc Gamell and Keita Teranishi and Manish Parashar and Jack Dongarra} } @conference {889, title = {Practical Scalable Consensus for Pseudo-Synchronous Distributed Systems}, booktitle = {The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC15)}, year = {2015}, month = {2015-11}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {Austin, TX}, abstract = {The ability to consistently handle faults in a distributed environment requires, among a small set of basic routines, an agreement algorithm allowing surviving entities to reach a consensual decision between a bounded set of volatile resources. This paper presents an algorithm that implements an Early Returning Agreement (ERA) in pseudo-synchronous systems, which optimistically allows a process to resume its activity while guaranteeing strong progress. We prove the correctness of our ERA algorithm, and expose its logarithmic behavior, which is an extremely desirable property for any algorithm which targets future exascale platforms. We detail a practical implementation of this consensus algorithm in the context of an MPI library, and evaluate both its efficiency and scalability through a set of benchmarks and two fault tolerant scientific applications.}, author = {Thomas Herault and Aurelien Bouteiller and George Bosilca and Marc Gamell and Keita Teranishi and Manish Parashar and Jack Dongarra} }