Resilience Against Soft Faults through Adaptivity in Spectral Deferred Correction

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that adaptive spectral deferred correction (SDC) methods can detect and correct transient faults in supercomputing environments, offering resilience comparable to specialized strategies without extra computational cost.

Contribution

It introduces an adaptive SDC approach that enhances fault resilience in numerical algorithms, leveraging recent advances in adaptive step size selection.

Findings

Adaptive SDC can detect transient faults.

Adaptive SDC can correct transient faults.

Performance comparable to Hot Rod resilience strategy.

Abstract

As supercomputers grow in hardware complexity, their susceptibility to faults increases and measures need to be taken to ensure the correctness of results. Some numerical algorithms have certain characteristics that allow them to recover from some types of faults. It has been demonstrated that adaptive Runge-Kutta methods provide resilience against transient faults without adding computational cost. Using recent advances in adaptive step size selection for spectral deferred correction (SDC), an iterative numerical time stepping scheme that can produce methods of arbitrary order, we show that adaptive SDC can also detect and correct transient faults. Its performance is found to be comparable to that of the dedicated resilience strategy Hot Rod.