Resilience and fault tolerance in high-performance computing for numerical weather and climate prediction
File(s)1094342021990433.pdf (2.06 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Progress in numerical weather and climate prediction accuracy greatly depends on the growth of the available computing power. As the number of cores in top computing facilities pushes into the millions, increased average frequency of hardware and software failures forces users to review their algorithms and systems in order to protect simulations from breakdown. This report surveys hardware, application-level and algorithm-level resilience approaches of particular relevance to time-critical numerical weather and climate prediction systems. A selection of applicable existing strategies is analysed, featuring interpolation-restart and compressed checkpointing for the numerical schemes, in-memory checkpointing, user-level failure mitigation and backup-based methods for the systems. Numerical examples showcase the performance of the techniques in addressing faults, with particular emphasis on iterative solvers for linear systems, a staple of atmospheric fluid flow solvers. The potential impact of these strategies is discussed in relation to current development of numerical weather prediction algorithms and systems towards the exascale. Trade-offs between performance, efficiency and effectiveness of resiliency strategies are analysed and some recommendations outlined for future developments.
Date Issued
2021-02-08
Date Acceptance
2021-02-01
Citation
International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, 2021, 35 (4), pp.285-311
ISSN
1094-3420
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Start Page
285
End Page
311
Journal / Book Title
International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
Volume
35
Issue
4
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
License URL
Identifier
http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000627544300001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture
Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
Computer Science
Fault-tolerant computing
high-performance computing
application-level resilience
numerical weather prediction
iterative solvers
MPI
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN 1094342021990433
Date Publish Online
2021-02-08