SHIELD: A Fault-Tolerant MPI for an Infiniband Cluster

Today’s high performance cluster computing technologies demand extreme robustness against unexpected failures to finish aggressively parallelized work in a given time constraint. Although there has been a steady effort in developing hardware and software tools to increase fault-resilience of cluster environments, a successful solution has yet to be delivered to commercial vendors. This paper presents SHIELD, a practical and easily-deployable fault-tolerant MPI and management system of MPI for an Infiniband cluster. SHIELD provides a novel framework that can be easily used in real cluster systems, and it has different design perspectives than those proposed by other fault-tolerant MPI. We show that SHIELD provides robust fault-resilience to fault-vulnerable cluster systems and that the design features of SHIELD are useful wherever fault-resilience is regarded as the matter of utmost importance.