Fault injection framework for system resilience evaluation: fake faults for finding future failures

As high-performance computing (HPC) systems increase in size and complexity they become more difficult to manage. The enormous component counts associated with these large systems lead to significant challenges in system reliability and availability. This in turn is driving research into the resilience of large scale systems, which seeks to curb the effects of increased failures at large scales by masking the inevitable faults in these systems. The basic premise being that failure must be accepted as a reality of large scale system and coped with accordingly through system resilience. A key component in the development and evaluation of system resilience techniques is having a means to conduct controlled experiments. A common method for performing such experiments is to generate synthetic faults and study the resulting effects. In this paper we discuss the motivation and our initial use of software fault injection to support the evaluation of resilience for HPC systems. We mention background and related work in the area and discuss the design of a tool to aid in fault injection experiments for both user-space (application-level) and system-level failures.