Resilient Work Stealing

Abstract: Future generations of processors will exhibit an increase of faults over their lifetime, and it becomes increasingly expensive to solve the resulting reliability issues purely at the hardware level. We propose to model computations in terms of restartable task graphs in order to improve reliability at the software level. As a proof of concept, we present Cobra, a novel design for a shared-memory work-stealing scheduler that realizes this notion of restartable task graphs, and enables computations to survive hardware failures due to soft errors. A comparison with the work-stealing scheduler of Threading Building Blocks on the PARSEC benchmark suite shows that Cobra incurs no performance overhead in the absence of failures, and low performance overheads in the presence of single and multiple failures.