A Cooperative Approach to Virtual Machine Based Fault Injection
By:
Naughton III, Thomas J; Engelmann, Christian ; Vallee, Geoffroy R; Aderholdt, William F; Scott, Stephen
Page Number:
671-682
Book Title:
Euro-Par 2016: Parallel Processing Workshops: Euro-Par 2016 International Workshops: 9th Workshop on Resiliency in High Performance Computing (Resilience) in Clusters, Clouds, and Grids, Grenoble, France, August 24-26, 2016, Revised Selected Papers
Publication Date:
June 2017
Publisher Location:
Springer International Publishing
Conference Name:
Euro-Par'16: 9th Workshop on Resiliency in High Performance Computing (Resilience) in Clusters, Cloud, and Grids
Conference Location:
Grenoble, France
Abstract
Resilience investigations often employ fault injection (FI) tools to study the effects of simulated errors on a target system. It is important to keep the target system under test (SUT) isolated from the controlling environment in order to maintain control of the experiement. Virtual machines (VMs) have been used to aid these investigations due to the strong isolation properties of system-level virtualization. A key challenge in fault injection tools is to gain proper insight and context about the SUT. In VM-based FI tools, this challenge of target con- text is increased due to the separation between host and guest (VM). We discuss an approach to VM-based FI that leverages virtual machine introspection (VMI) methods to gain insight into the target’s context running within the VM. The key to this environment is the ability to provide basic information to the FI system that can be used to create a map of the target environment. We describe a proof- of-concept implementation and a demonstration of its use to introduce simulated soft errors into an iterative solver benchmark running in user-space of a guest VM.
