Abstract

Computational clusters have long provided a mechanism for the acceleration of high performance computing (HPC) applications. With today's supercomputers now exceeding the petaflop scale, however, they are also exhibiting an increase in heterogeneity. This heterogeneity spans a range of technologies, from multiple operating systems to hardware accelerators and novel architectures. Because of the exceptional acceleration some of these heterogeneous architectures provide, they are being embraced as viable tools for HPC applications. Given the scale of today's supercomputers, it is clear that scientists must consider the use of fault-tolerance in their applications. This is particularly true as computational clusters with hundreds and thousands of processors become ubiquitous in large-scale scientific computing, leading to lower mean-times-to-failure. This forces the systems to effectively deal with the possibility …

Date

July 1, 2010

Authors

Vipin Chaudhary, John Paul N Walters, Hai Jiang

Publisher

Nova Science Publishers, Inc.