Towards Management of Energy Consumption in HPC Systems with Fault Tolerance

High-performance computing continues to increase its computing power and energy efficiency. However, energy consumption continues to rise and finding ways to limit and/or decrease it is a crucial point in current research. For high-performance MPI applications, there are rollback recovery based fault tolerance methods, such as uncoordinated checkpoints. These methods allow only some processes to go back in the face of failure, while the rest of the processes continue to run. In this article, we focus on the processes that continue execution, and propose a series of strategies to manage energy consumption when a failure occurs and uncoordinated checkpoints are used. We present an energy model to evaluate strategies and through simulation we analyze the behavior of an application under different configurations and failure time. As a result, we show the feasibility of improving energy efficiency in HPC systems in the presence of a failure. Keywords— Energy consumption, energy saving, power management, fault tolerance, uncoordinated checkpoint, HPC, distributed memory, MPI, DVFS, ACPI