Checkpointing with mutable checkpoints

  • Authors:

  • Guohong Cao;Mukesh Singhal

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA;Department of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio-State University, Columbus, OH

  • Venue:
  • Theoretical Computer Science - Dependable computing
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

There are two approaches to reduce the overhead associated with coordinated checkpointing: first is to minimize the number of synchronization messages and the number of checkpoints; the other is to make the checkpointing process non-blocking. In our previous work (IEEE Parallel Distributed Systems 9 (12) (1998) 1213), we proved that there does not exist a nonblocking algorithm which forces only a minimum number of processes to take their checkpoints. In this paper, we present a min-process algorithm which relaxes the non-blocking condition while tries to minimize the blocking time, and a non-blocking algorithm which relaxes the min-process condition while minimizing the number of checkpoints saved on the stable storage. The proposed non-blocking algorithm is based on the concept of "mutable checkpoint", which is neither a tentative checkpoint nor a permanent checkpoint. Based on mutable checkpoints, our nonblocking algorithm avoids the avalanche effect and forces only a minimum number of processes to take their checkpoints on the stable storage.