RDMA-Based Job Migration Framework for MPI over InfiniBand

Coordinated checkpoint and recovery is a common approach to achieve fault tolerance on large-scale systems. The traditional mechanism dumps the process image to a local disk or a central storage area of all the processes involved in the parallel job. When a failure occurs, the processes are restarted and restored to the latest checkpoint image. However, this kind of approach is unable to provide the scalability required by increasingly large-sized jobs, since it puts heavy I/O burden on the storage subsystem, and resubmitting a job during restart phase incurs lengthy queuing delay. In this paper, we enhance the fault tolerance of MVAPICH2, an open-source high performance MPI-2 implementation, by using a proactive job migration scheme. Instead of checkpointing all the processes of the job and saving their process images to a stable storage, we transfer the processes running on a health-deteriorating node to a healthy spare node, and resume these processes from the spare node. RDMA-based process image transmission is designed to take advantage of high performance communication in InfiniBand. Experimental results show that the Job Migration scheme can achieve a speedup of 4.49 times over the Checkpoint/Restart scheme to handle a node failure for a 64-process application running on 8 compute nodes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such job migration design for InfiniBand-based clusters.