Application Health Monitoring for Extreme-scale Resiliency using Cooperative Fault Management.

Resiliency is and will be a critical factor in determining scientific productivity on current and exascale supercomputers, and beyond. Applications oblivious to and incapable of handling transient soft and hard errors could waste supercomputing resources or, worse, yield misleading scientific insights. We introduce a novel application-driven silent error detection and recovery strategy based on application health monitoring. Our methodology uses application output that follows known patterns as indicators of an application's health, and knowledge that violation of these patterns could be indication of faults. Information from system monitors that report hardware and software health status is used to corroborate faults. Collectively, this information is used by a fault coordinator agent to take preventive and corrective measures by applying computational steering to an application between checkpoints. This cooperative fault management system uses the Fault Tolerance Backplane as a communication channel. The benefits of this framework are demonstrated with two real application case studies, molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry simulations, on scalable clusters with simulated memory and I/O corruptions. The developed approach is general and can be easily applied to other applications.

Performance optimization of tensor contraction expressions for many-body methods in quantum chemistry.

Complex tensor contraction expressions arise in accurate electronic structure models in quantum chemistry, such as the coupled cluster method. This paper addresses two complementary aspects of performance optimization of such tensor contraction expressions. Transformations using algebraic properties of commutativity and associativity can be used to significantly decrease the number of arithmetic operations required for evaluation of these expressions. The identification of common subexpressions among a set of tensor contraction expressions can result in a reduction of the total number of operations required to evaluate the tensor contractions. The first part of the paper describes an effective algorithm for operation minimization with common subexpression identification and demonstrates its effectiveness on tensor contraction expressions for coupled cluster equations. The second part of the paper highlights the importance of data layout transformation in the optimization of tensor contraction computations on modern processors. A number of considerations, such as minimization of cache misses and utilization of multimedia vector instructions, are discussed. A library for efficient index permutation of multidimensional tensors is described, and experimental performance data is provided that demonstrates its effectiveness.