DejaVu: Transparent User-Level Checkpointing, Migration, and Recovery for Distributed Systems

In this paper, we present a new fault tolerance system called DejaVu for transparent and automatic checkpointing, migration, and recovery of parallel and distributed applications. DejaVu provides a transparent parallel checkpointing and recovery mechanism that recovers from any combination of systems failures without any modification to parallel applications or the OS. It uses a new runtime mechanism for transparent incremental checkpointing that captures the least amount of state needed to maintain global consistency and provides a novel communication architecture that enables transparent migration of existing MPI codes, without source-code modifications. Performance results from the production-ready implementation show less than 5% overhead in real-world parallel applications with large memory footprints.