I/O threads to reduce checkpoint blocking for an electromagnetics solver on Blue Gene/P and Cray XK6

Abstract

Application-level checkpointing has been one of the most popular techniques to proactively deal with unexpected failures in supercomputers with hundreds of thousands of cores. Unfortunately, this approach results in heavy I/O load and often causes I/O bottlenecks in production runs. In this paper, we examine a new thread-based application-level checkpointing for a massively parallel electromagnetic solver system on the IBM Blue Gene/P at Argonne National Laboratory and the Cray XK6 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We discuss an I/O-thread based, application-level, two-phase I/O approach, called "threaded reduced-blocking I/O" (threaded rbIO), and compare it with a regular version of "reduced-blocking I/O" (rbIO) and a tuned MPI-IO collective approach (coIO). Our study shows that threaded rbIO can overlap the I/O latency with computation and achieve near-asynchronous checkpoint with an application-perceived I/O performance of over 70 GB/s (raw of 15 GB/s) and 50 GB/s (raw I/O bandwidth of 17 GB/s) on up to 32K processors of Intrepid and Jaguar, respectively. Compared with rbIO and coIO, the threading approach greatly improves the production performance of NekCEM on Blue Gene/P and Cray XK6 machines by significantly reducing the total simulation time from checkpoint blocking reduction. We also discuss the potential strength of this approach with the Scalable Checkpoint Restart library and on other full-featured operating systems such as that to be deployed on the upcoming Blue Gene/Q.