Large scientific applications deployed on current petascale systems expend a significant amount of their execution time dumping checkpoint files to remote storage. New fault tolerant techniques will be critical to efficiently exploit post-petascale systems. In this work, we propose a low-overhead high-frequency multi-level checkpoint technique in which we integrate a highly-reliable topology-aware Reed-Solomon encoding in a three-level checkpoint scheme. We efficiently hide the encoding time using one Fault-Tolerance dedicated thread per node. We implement our technique in the Fault Tolerance Interface FTI. We evaluate the correctness of our performance model and conduct a study of the reliability of our library. To demonstrate the performance of FTI, we present a case study of the Mw9.0 Tohoku Japan earthquake simulation with SPECFEM3D on TSUBAME2.0. We demonstrate a checkpoint overhead as low as 8% on sustained 0.1 petaflops runs (1152 GPUs) while checkpointing at high frequency.

We use 1944 processors of the Earth Simulator to model seismic wave propagation resulting from large earthquakes. Simulations are conducted based upon the spectral-element method, a high-degree finite-element technique with an exactly diagonal mass matrix. We use a very large mesh with 5.5 billion grid points (14.6 billion degrees of freedom). We include the full complexity of the Earth, i.e., a three-dimensional wave-speed and density structure, a 3-D crustal model, ellipticity as well as topography and bathymetry. A total of 2.5 terabytes of memory is needed. Our implementation is purely based upon MPI, with loop vectorization on each processor. We obtain an excellent vectorization ratio of 99.3%, and we reach a performance of 5 teraflops (30% of the peak performance) on 38% of the machine. The very high resolution of the mesh allows us to perform fully three-dimensional calculations at seismic periods as low as 5 seconds.