Fault Oblivious Eigenvalue Solver

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fault-tolerant eigenvalue solver using erasure-coded computations, enabling reliable large-scale eigenvalue analysis on massively parallel systems despite hardware failures.

Contribution

It presents a novel erasure-coded approach that reformulates eigenvalue problems for fault-oblivious computation, ensuring robustness and efficiency in large-scale environments.

Findings

Effective fault-tolerant eigenvalue computation demonstrated

Minimal overhead with robust convergence maintained

Scales efficiently with increasing faults

Abstract

Eigenvalue problems serve as fundamental substrates for applications in large-scale scientific simulations and machine learning, often requiring computation on massively parallel platforms. As these platforms scale to hundreds of thousands of cores, hardware failures become a significant challenge to reliability and efficiency. In this paper, we propose and analyze a novel fault-tolerant eigenvalue solver based on erasure-coded computations -- a technique that enhances resilience by augmenting the system with redundant data a priori. This transformation reformulates the original eigenvalue problem as a generalized eigenvalue problem, enabling fault-oblivious computation while preserving numerical stability and convergence properties. We formulate the augmentation scheme, establish the necessary conditions for the encoded blocks, and prove the relationship between the original and transformed problems. We implement an erasure-coded TraceMin eigensolver and demonstrate its effectiveness in extracting eigenvalues in the presence of faults. Our experimental results show that the proposed solver incurs minimal computational overhead, maintains robust convergence, and scales efficiently with the number of faults, making it a practical solution for resilient eigenvalue computations in large-scale systems.