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Characterizing Memory Failures Using Benford’s Law

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Euro-Par 2021: Parallel Processing Workshops (Euro-Par 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13098))

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Abstract

Fault tolerance is a key challenge as high performance computing systems continue to increase component counts, individual component reliability decreases, and hardware and software complexity increases. To better understand the potential impacts of failures on next-generation systems, significant effort has been devoted to collecting, characterizing and analyzing failures on current systems. These studies require large volumes of data and complex analysis in an attempt to identify statistical properties of the failure data.

In this paper, we examine the lifetime of failures on the Cielo supercomputer that was located at Los Alamos National Laboratory, looking specifically at the time between faults on this system. Through this analysis, we show that the time between uncorrectable faults for this system obeys Benford’s law, This law applies to a number of naturally occurring collections of numbers and states that the leading digit is more likely to be small, for example a leading digit of 1 is more likely than 9. We also show that a number of common distributions used to model failures also follow this law. This work provides critical analysis on the distribution of times between failures for extreme-scale systems. Specifically, the analysis in this work could be used as a simple form of failure prediction or used for modeling realistic failures.

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Acknowledgment

Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Computing Research, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, USA

    Kurt B. Ferreira & Scott Levy

Authors
  1. Kurt B. Ferreira
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  2. Scott Levy
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Correspondence to Kurt B. Ferreira .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ricardo Chaves

  2. Department of Computer Engineering, CiTIUS, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña, Spain

    Dora B. Heras

  3. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Aleksandar Ilic

  4. Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Didem Unat

  5. Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain

    Rosa M. Badia

  6. University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Bracciali

  7. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA

    Patrick Diehl

  8. Mathematics and Computer Science, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA

    Anshu Dubey

  9. Ajou University, Suwon, Korea (Republic of)

    Oh Sangyoon

  10. Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, TN, USA

    Stephen L. Scott

  11. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Laura Ricci

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Ferreira, K.B., Levy, S. (2022). Characterizing Memory Failures Using Benford’s Law. In: Chaves, R., et al. Euro-Par 2021: Parallel Processing Workshops. Euro-Par 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13098. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06156-1_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06156-1_25

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06156-1

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