Seminars & Events

Mathematics and Computer Science Division
"Advanced Fault Resilience Techniques for Exascale Numerical Simulations"

DATE: June 4, 2012 to June 4, 2012
TIME: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
SPEAKER: Franck Cappello, Co‐Director of the INRIA-­Illinois on Petascale Computing & Senior Researcher at INRIA
LOCATION: Building 240, TCS Conference Room 1416, Argonne National Laboratory
HOST: Marc Snir

Description:
Numerical simulation is considered the third pillar of science, complementing theory and experiments. Simulation is also of utmost importance in industry. Indeed many science domains, like earth science, life science, physics, chemistry, rely largely on computationally intensive simulations. Scientists have defined their computational needs for the end of this decade at the Exascale level; 10^18 operations per second. Since 2009, many workshops of leaders and top researchers at national and international scale produced roadmaps in hardware and software to meet this objective. Participants expressed a major concern: Exascale systems will experience many more faults than current systems. Fault resilience is not an option; it is essential in the design of Exascale platforms. However, the current approach used in production relies on concepts defined 30 years ago for generic distributed systems. Several recent studies question its applicability at Exascale and advocate for the exploration of novel, potentially disruptive fault resilience techniques. In this talk, we will present promising techniques toward fault resilience at Exascale. We will cover optimizations of fault tolerance and more disruptive fault avoidance approaches. In particular, we will show how we can conceive more efficient fault resilience based on the fundamental characteristics of the numerical simulation codes and the dynamic behaviors of the production platforms.

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