On the Design of Reliable Heterogeneous Systems via Checkpoint Placement and Core Assignment

This paper studies two basic problems in the design of high-performance and high-reliability heterogeneous systems: (1) what type of core to execute each task, and (2) where to place checkpoints in the execution of tasks. The implementation of checkpointing techniques on the novel persistent memory (e.g., 3D Xpoint memory) based heterogeneous systems faces a bundle of new problems. First, the assignments of tasks may greatly influence the execution time of the whole application. Therefore, with the same time constraint, the reliability of the resultant system can be significantly affected. Second, creating checkpoints will incur heavy writes on persistent memories and reduce the lifetime of devices. In this paper, we optimally construct reliable systems by assigning tasks to the most suitable cores and placing minimum number of checkpoints in the application, such that the resultant system can satisfy the time constraint in the presence of faults. We devise an efficient dynamic programming algorithm to obtain the optimal assignment and checkpoint placement. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with existing approaches, our technique can achieve 44% reductions on the number of checkpoints on average.