Optimal real number codes for fault tolerant matrix operations

Abstract

It has been demonstrated recently that single fail-stop process failure in ScaLAPACK matrix multiplication can be tolerated without checkpointing. Multiple simultaneous processor failures can be tolerated without checkpointing by encoding matrices using a real-number erasure correcting code. However, the floating-point representation of a real number in today's high performance computer architecture introduces round off errors which can be enlarged and cause the loss of precision of possibly all effective digits during recovery when the number of processors in the system is large. In this paper, we present a class of Reed-Solomon style real-number erasure correcting codes which have optimal numerical stability during recovery. We analytically construct the numerically best erasure correcting codes for 2 erasures and develop an approximation method to computationally construct numerically good codes for 3 or more erasures. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed codes are numerically much more stable than existing codes.