Pinpointing Crash-Consistency Bugs in the HPC I/O Stack: A Cross-Layer Approach

Authors: Jinghan Sun, Jian Huang, and Marc Snir (University of Illinois)

Abstract: We present ParaCrash, a testing framework for studying crash recovery in a typical HPC I/O stack, and demonstrate its use by identifying 15 new crash-consistency bugs in various parallel file systems (PFS) and I/O libraries. ParaCrash uses a "golden version'' approach to test the entire HPC I/O stack: storage state after recovery from a crash is correct if it matches the state that can be achieved by a partial execution with no crashes. It supports systematic testing of a multilayered I/O stack while properly identifying the layer responsible for the bugs.




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