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2015-19: Catalog: Characterizing Faults, Errors, and Failures in Extreme-Scale Systems

US Department of Energy (DOE) leadership computing facilities are in the process of deploying extreme-scale high-performance computing (HPC) systems with the long-range goal of building exascale systems that perform more than a quintillion (a billion billion) operations per second. More powerful computers mean researchers can simulate biological, chemical, and other physical interactions with an unprecedented amount of realism. However, as HPC systems become more complex, system integrators, component manufacturers as well as computing facilities have to and are preparing for unique computing challenges. Of particular concern are occurrences of unfamiliar or more frequent faults in both hardware technologies and software applications that can lead to computational errors or system failures.

This project helps DOE computing facilities protect extreme-scale systems by characterizing potential faults and creating models that predict their propagation and impact. The Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (CORAL) is a private/public partnership that will stand up three extreme-scale systems. By monitoring hardware and software performance on current DOE systems and applying the data to fault analysis and vulnerability studies, this effort captures observed and inferred fault conditions and extrapolate this knowledge to CORAL and other extreme-scale systems.

Using these analyses, the project team creates assessment tools, including a fault taxonomy and catalog as well as fault models, to provide computing facilities with a clear picture of the fault characteristics in DOE computing environments and inform technical and operational decisions to improve resilience. For more information, please visit ornlwiki.atlassian.net/wiki/display/CFEFIES.


Figure: Analysis results of 1.2 billion node hours of logs from the Jaguar, Titan, and Eos systems at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)

Prominent Solutions

Funding Sources

Participating Institutions

In the News

2021-01-04: HPCwire. What’s New in HPC Research: GPU Lifetimes, the Square Kilometre Array, Support Tickets & More.
2018-11-19: HPCwire. What’s New in HPC Research: Thrill for Big Data, Scaling Resilience and More.
2018-08-05: inside HPC. Characterizing Faults, Errors and Failures in Extreme-Scale Computing Systems.

Peer-reviewed Journal Publications

  1. Emmanuel Agullo, Mirco Altenbernd, Hartwig Anzt, Leonardo Bautista-Gomez, Tommaso Benacchio, Luca Bonaventura, Hans-Joachim Bungartz, Sanjay Chatterjee, Florina M. Ciorba, Nathan DeBardeleben, Daniel Drzisga, Sebastian Eibl, Christian Engelmann, Wilfried N. Gansterer, Luc Giraud, Dominik Göddeke, Marco Heisig, Fabienne Jézéquel, Nils Kohl, Xiaoye Sherry Li, Romain Lion, Miriam Mehl, Paul Mycek, Michael Obersteiner, Enrique S. Quintana-Ortí, Francesco Rizzi, Ulrich Rüde, Martin Schulz, Fred Fung, Robert Speck, Linda Stals, Keita Teranishi, Samuel Thibault, Dominik Thönnes, Andreas Wagner, and Barbara Wohlmuth. Resiliency in Numerical Algorithm Design for Extreme Scale Simulations. International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA), volume 36, number 2, pages 251-285, March 1, 2022. SAGE Publications. ISSN 1094-3420. DOI 10.1177/10943420211055188. Abstract Publication BibTeX Citation
  2. Mohit Kumar, Saurabh Gupta, Tirthak Patel, Michael Wilder, Weisong Shi, Song Fu, Christian Engelmann, and Devesh Tiwari. Study of Interconnect Errors, Network Congestion, and Applications Characteristics for Throttle Prediction on a Large Scale HPC System. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC), volume 153, pages 29-43, July 1, 2021. Elsevier B.V, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. ISSN 0743-7315. DOI 10.1016/j.jpdc.2021.03.001. Abstract Publication BibTeX Citation
  3. Marc Snir, Robert W. Wisniewski, Jacob A. Abraham, Sarita V. Adve, Saurabh Bagchi, Pavan Balaji, Jim Belak, Pradip Bose, Franck Cappello, Bill Carlson, Andrew A. Chien, Paul Coteus, Nathan A. Debardeleben, Pedro Diniz, Christian Engelmann, Mattan Erez, Saverio Fazzari, Al Geist, Rinku Gupta, Fred Johnson, Sriram Krishnamoorthy, Sven Leyffer, Dean Liberty, Subhasish Mitra, Todd Munson, Rob Schreiber, Jon Stearley, and Eric Van Hensbergen. Addressing Failures in Exascale Computing. International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA), volume 28, number 2, pages 127-171, May 1, 2014. SAGE Publications. ISSN 1094-3420. DOI 10.1177/1094342014522573. Abstract Publication BibTeX Citation

Peer-reviewed Conference Publications

  1. George Ostrouchov, Don Maxwell, Rizwan Ashraf, Christian Engelmann, Mallikarjun Shankar, and James Rogers. GPU Lifetimes on Titan Supercomputer: Survival Analysis and Reliability. In Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC) 2020, pages 41:1-14, Atlanta, GA, USA, November 15-20, 2020. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA. ISBN 9781728199986. DOI 10.1109/SC41405.2020.00045. Acceptance rate 25.1% (95/378). Abstract Publication Presentation BibTeX Citation
  2. Mohit Kumar, Saurabh Gupta, Tirthak Patel, Michael Wilder, Weisong Shi, Song Fu, Christian Engelmann, and Devesh Tiwari. Understanding and Analyzing Interconnect Errors and Network Congestion on a Large Scale HPC System. In Proceedings of the 48th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) 2018, pages 107-114, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, June 25-28, 2018. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. ISBN 978-1-5386-5596-2. ISSN 2158-3927. DOI 10.1109/DSN.2018.00023. Acceptance rate 27.2% (62/228). Abstract Publication BibTeX Citation
  3. Bin Nie, Ji Xue, Saurabh Gupta, Tirthak Patel, Christian Engelmann, Evgenia Smirni, and Devesh Tiwari. Machine Learning Models for GPU Error Prediction in a Large Scale HPC System. In Proceedings of the 48th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) 2018, pages 95-106, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, June 25-28, 2018. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. ISBN 978-1-5386-5596-2. ISSN 2158-3927. DOI 10.1109/DSN.2018.00022. Acceptance rate 27.2% (62/228). Abstract Publication BibTeX Citation
  4. Saurabh Gupta, Tirthak Patel, Christian Engelmann, and Devesh Tiwari. Failures in Large Scale Systems: Long-term Measurement, Analysis, and Implications. In Proceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC) 2017, pages 44:1-44:12, Denver, CO, USA, November 12-17, 2017. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA. ISBN 978-1-4503-5114-0. DOI 10.1145/3126908.3126937. Acceptance rate 18.7% (61/327). Abstract Publication Presentation BibTeX Citation
  5. Bin Nie, Ji Xue, Saurabh Gupta, Christian Engelmann, Evgenia Smirni, and Devesh Tiwari. Characterizing Temperature, Power, and Soft-Error Behaviors in Data Center Systems: Insights, Challenges, and Opportunities. In Proceedings of the 25th IEEE International Symposium on the Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS) 2017, pages 22-31, Banff, AB, Canada, September 20-22, 2017. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. ISBN 978-1-5386-2764-8. ISSN 2375-0227. DOI 10.1109/MASCOTS.2017.12. Acceptance rate 30.95% (26/84). Abstract Publication BibTeX Citation
  6. Kun Tang, Devesh Tiwari, Saurabh Gupta, Ping Huang, QiQi Lu, Christian Engelmann, and Xubin He. Power-Capping Aware Checkpointing: On the Interplay Among Power-Capping, Temperature, Reliability, Performance, and Energy. In Proceedings of the 46th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) 2016, pages 311-322, Toulouse, France, June 28 – July 1, 2016. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. ISSN 2158-3927. DOI 10.1109/DSN.2016.36. Acceptance rate 22.4% (58/259). Abstract Publication BibTeX Citation
  7. Leonardo Bautista-Gomez, Ana Gainaru, Swann Perarnau, Devesh Tiwari, Saurabh Gupta, Franck Cappello, Christian Engelmann, and Marc Snir. Reducing Waste in Extreme Scale Systems Through Introspective Analysis. In Proceedings of the 30th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) 2016, pages 212-221, Chicago, IL, USA, May 23-27, 2016. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. ISSN 1530-2075. DOI 10.1109/IPDPS.2016.100. Acceptance rate 23.0% (114/496). Abstract Publication Presentation BibTeX Citation

Peer-reviewed Workshop Publications

  1. Yawei Hui, Byung Hoon (Hoony) Park, and Christian Engelmann. A Comprehensive Informative Metric for Analyzing HPC System Status using the LogSCAN Platform. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC) Workshops 2018: 8th Workshop on Fault Tolerance for HPC at eXtreme Scale (FTXS) 2018, pages 29-38, Dallas, TX, USA, November 16, 2018. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. ISBN 978-1-7281-0222-1. DOI 10.1109/FTXS.2018.00007. Acceptance rate 45.0% (9/20). Abstract Publication Presentation BibTeX Citation
  2. Rizwan Ashraf and Christian Engelmann. Analyzing the Impact of System Reliability Events on Applications in the Titan Supercomputer. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC) Workshops 2018: 8th Workshop on Fault Tolerance for HPC at eXtreme Scale (FTXS) 2018, pages 39-48, Dallas, TX, USA, November 16, 2018. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. ISBN 978-1-7281-0222-1. DOI 10.1109/FTXS.2018.00008. Acceptance rate 45.0% (9/20). Abstract Publication Presentation BibTeX Citation
  3. Byung Hoon (Hoony) Park, Yawei Hui, Swen Boehm, Rizwan Ashraf, Christian Engelmann, and Christopher Layton. A Big Data Analytics Framework for HPC Log Data: Three Case Studies Using the Titan Supercomputer Log. In Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster) 2018: 5th Workshop on Monitoring and Analysis for High Performance Systems Plus Applications (HPCMASPA) 2018, pages 571-579, Belfast, UK, September 10, 2018. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. ISBN 978-1-5386-8319-4. ISSN 2168-9253. DOI 10.1109/CLUSTER.2018.00073. Abstract Publication Presentation BibTeX Citation
  4. Byung Hoon (Hoony) Park, Saurabh Hukerikar, Christian Engelmann, and Ryan Adamson. Big Data Meets HPC Log Analytics: Scalable Approach to Understanding Systems at Extreme Scale. In Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster) 2017: 4th Workshop on Monitoring and Analysis for High Performance Systems Plus Applications (HPCMASPA) 2017, pages 758-765, Honolulu, HI, USA, September 5, 2017. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. ISBN 978-1-5386-2327-5. ISSN 2168-9253. DOI 10.1109/CLUSTER.2017.113. Abstract Publication Presentation BibTeX Citation

Peer-reviewed Conference Posters

  1. Yawei Hui, Rizwan Ashraf, Byung Hoon (Hoony) Park, and Christian Engelmann. Real-Time Assessment of Supercomputer Status by a Comprehensive Informative Metric through Streaming Processing. Poster at the 6th IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData) 2018, Seattle, WA, USA, December 10-13, 2018. Abstract Publication BibTeX Citation
  2. Yawei Hui, Byung Hoon (Hoony) Park, and Christian Engelmann. A Comprehensive Informative Metric for Summarizing HPC System Status. Poster at the 8th IEEE Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization in conjunction with the 8th IEEE Vis 2018, Berlin, Germany, October 21, 2018. Abstract Publication BibTeX Citation

White Papers

  1. Mingyan Li, Robert A. Bridges, Pablo Moriano, Christian Engelmann, Feiyi Wang, and Ryan Adamson. Toward Effective Security/Reliability Situational Awareness via Concurrent Security-or-Fault Analytics . White paper accepted at the U.S. Department of Energy's ASCR Workshop on Cybersecurity and Privacy for Scientific Computing Ecosystems, November 3-5, 2021. Abstract Publication BibTeX Citation
  2. Petar Radojkovic, Manolis Marazakis, Paul Carpenter, Reiley Jeyapaul, Dimitris Gizopoulos, Martin Schulz, Adria Armejach, Eduard Ayguade, François Bodin, Ramon Canal, Franck Cappello, Fabien Chaix, Guillaume Colin de Verdiere, Said Derradji, Stefano Di Carlo, Christian Engelmann, Ignacio Laguna, Miquel Moreto, Onur Mutlu, Lazaros Papadopoulos, Olly Perks, Manolis Ploumidis, Bezhad Salami, Yanos Sazeides, Dimitrios Soudris, Yiannis Sourdis, Per Stenstrom, Samuel Thibault, Will Toms, and Osman Unsal. Towards Resilient EU HPC Systems: A Blueprint. White paper by the European HPC resilience initiative, April 9, 2020. Abstract Publication BibTeX Citation
  3. Devesh Tiwari, Saurabh Gupta, and Christian Engelmann. Lightweight, Actionable Analytical Tools Based on Statistical Learning for Efficient System Operations. White paper accepted at the U.S. Department of Energy's Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Systems & Applications (ModSim) 2016, August 10-12, 2016. Abstract Publication Presentation BibTeX Citation
  4. Marc Snir, and Robert W. Wisniewski, Jacob A. Abraham, Sarita V. Adve, Saurabh Bagchi, Pavan Balaji, Bill Carlson, Andrew A. Chien, Pedro Diniz, Christian Engelmann, Rinku Gupta, Fred Johnson, Jim Belak, Pradip Bose, Franck Cappello, Paul Coteus, Nathan A. Debardeleben, Mattan Erez, Saverio Fazzari, Al Geist, Sriram Krishnamoorthy, Sven Leyffer, Dean Liberty, Subhasish Mitra, Todd Munson, Rob Schreiber, Jon Stearley, and Eric Van Hensbergen. Addressing Failures in Exascale Computing. Workshop report, August 4-11, 2013. Publication BibTeX Citation
  5. Al Geist, Bob Lucas, Marc Snir, Shekhar Borkar, Eric Roman, Mootaz Elnozahy, Bert Still, Andrew Chien, Robert Clay, John Wu, Christian Engelmann, Nathan DeBardeleben, Rob Ross, Larry Kaplan, Martin Schulz, Mike Heroux, Sriram Krishnamoorthy, Lucy Nowell, Abhinav Vishnu, and Lee-Ann Talley. U.S. Department of Energy Fault Management Workshop. Workshop report for the U.S. Department of Energy, June 6, 2012. Abstract Publication BibTeX Citation

Talks and Lectures

  1. Christian Engelmann. Designing Smart and Resilient Extreme-Scale Systems. Invited talk at the 20th SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP) 2022, Seattle, WA, USA, February 23-26, 2022. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  2. Christian Engelmann. Faults, Errors and Failures in Extreme-Scale Supercomputers. Keynote talk at the 14th Workshop on Resiliency in High Performance Computing (Resilience) in Clusters, Clouds, and Grids, held in conjunction with the 27th European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par) 2021, Lisbon, Portugal, August 30, 2021. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  3. Christian Engelmann. The Resilience Problem in Extreme Scale Computing: Experiences and the Path Forward. Invited talk at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) 2021, Fort Worth, TX, USA, March 1-5, 2021. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  4. Christian Engelmann. Smart and Resilient Extreme-Scale Systems. Invited talk at the Workshop on Resilience in High Performance Computing (RESILIENTHPC), held in conjunction with the European Network on High-performance Embedded Architecture and Compilation (HiPEAC) Conference 2021, Budapest, Hungary, January 19, 2021. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  5. Christian Engelmann. The Resilience Problem in Extreme Scale Computing. Invited talk at the 19th SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP) 2020, Seattle, WA, USA, February 12-15, 2020. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  6. Christian Engelmann. Resilience for Extreme Scale Systems: Understanding the Problem. Invited talk at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) 2019, Spokane, WA, USA, February 25 – March 1, 2018. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  7. Christian Engelmann. Characterizing Faults, Errors, and Failures in Extreme-Scale Systems. Invited talk at the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) Conference 2018, Basel, Switzerland, July 2-4, 2018. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  8. Christian Engelmann. Characterizing Faults, Errors, and Failures in Extreme-Scale Systems. Invited talk at the 6th Accelerated Data Analytics and Computing (ADAC) Institute Workshop, Zurich, Switzerland, June 20-21, 2018. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  9. Christian Engelmann. A Catalog of Faults, Errors, and Failures in Extreme-Scale Systems. Invited talk at the SIAM Annual Meeting (AM) 2017, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, July 10-14, 2017. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  10. Christian Engelmann. Characterizing Faults, Errors and Failures in Extreme-Scale Computing Systems. Invited talk at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2017, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, June 16-22, 2017. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  11. Christian Engelmann. A Catalog of Faults, Errors, and Failures in Extreme-Scale Systems. Invited talk at the 12th Scheduling for Large Scale Systems Workshop (SLSSW) 2017, Knoxville, TN, USA, May 24-26, 2017. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  12. Christian Engelmann. The Missing High-Performance Computing Fault Model. Invited talk at the 17th SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP) 2016, Paris, France, April 12-15, 2016. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  13. Christian Engelmann. Resilience Challenges and Solutions for Extreme-Scale Supercomputing. Invited talk at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD, USA, February 18, 2016. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation
  14. Christian Engelmann. Toward A Fault Model And Resilience Design Patterns For Extreme Scale Systems. Keynote talk at the 8th Workshop on Resiliency in High Performance Computing (Resilience) in Clusters, Clouds, and Grids, held in conjunction with the 21st European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par) 2015, Vienna, Austria, August 24-28, 2015. Abstract Presentation BibTeX Citation

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