Title: Predicting robustness against transient faults of MPI based programs

Authors: Joao Gramacho; Alvaro Wong; Dolores Rexachs; Emilio Luque

Addresses: Computer Architecture and Operating Systems Department, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Campus UAB, Edifici Q, 08193, Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain ' Computer Architecture and Operating Systems Department, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Campus UAB, Edifici Q, 08193, Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain ' Computer Architecture and Operating Systems Department, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Campus UAB, Edifici Q, 08193, Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain ' Computer Architecture and Operating Systems Department, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Campus UAB, Edifici Q, 08193, Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain

Abstract: The evaluation of a program's behaviour in the presence of transient faults is often a very time consuming work. In order to achieve significant data, thousands of executions are required and each execution will have the significant overhead of the fault injection environment. A previously published methodology reduced significantly the time needed to evaluate the robustness of a program execution by exhaustively analysing its execution trace instead of using fault injection. In this paper we present a further improvement in the evaluation time of parallel programs robustness against transient faults by combining this methodology with PAS2P - a method that strives to describe an application based on its message-passing activity. This combination allowed us to predict the robustness of larger parallel programs, reducing in some cases by more than 20 times the time needed to calculate the robustness while obtaining a robustness prediction error of less than 4%.

Keywords: transient faults; robustness prediction; soft errors; reliability; parallel application signature; performance prediction; PAS2P; MPI; message passing interface; program execution; parallel programs.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2016.076218

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2016 Vol.12 No.2/3, pp.155 - 165

Received: 31 Jan 2013
Accepted: 09 Jun 2013

Published online: 30 Apr 2016 *

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