Checkpoint and Restart: An Energy Consumption Characterization in Clusters

TL;DR

This study characterizes the energy consumption of checkpoint and restart operations in HPC clusters, analyzing hardware and software factors affecting energy use to identify reduction opportunities.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of energy factors in checkpoint/restart processes, focusing on hardware/software configurations in homogeneous HPC clusters.

Findings

Performance and power states significantly impact energy consumption.

Checkpoint software and file system configurations influence energy use.

Opportunities to optimize energy efficiency during checkpoint/restart operations.

Abstract

The fault tolerance method currently used in High Performance Computing (HPC) is the rollback-recovery method by using checkpoints. This, like any other fault tolerance method, adds an additional energy consumption to that of the execution of the application. The objective of this work is to determine the factors that affect the energy consumption of the computing nodes on homogeneous cluster, when performing checkpoint and restart operations, on SPMD (Single Program Multiple Data) applications. We have focused on the energetic study of compute nodes, contemplating different configurations of hardware and software parameters. We studied the effect of performance states (states P) and power states (states C) of processors, application problem size, checkpoint software (DMTCP) and distributed file system (NFS) configuration. The results analysis allowed to identify opportunities to reduce the energy consumption of checkpoint and restart operations.