Toward a General Theory of Optimal Checkpoint Placement

Checkpoint/restart has been widely used to cope with fail-stop errors. The checkpointing frequency is most often optimized by assuming an exponential failure distribution. However, field studies show that most often failures do not follow a constant failure rate exponential distribution. Therefore, the optimal checkpointing frequency should be computed and tuned considering the different distributions that failures follow. Moreover, due to operating system and input/output jitter and hybrid solutions that combine checkpointing with other techniques, such as data compression, checkpointing time can no longer be assumed constant. Thus, time varying checkpointing time should be accounted for to realistically model the application execution.In this study, we develop a mathematical theory and model to optimize the checkpointing frequency with respect to arbitrary failure distributions while capturing time-dependent non-constant checkpointing time. We show that we can provide closed-form formulas for important failure distributions in most cases. By instantiating our model, we study and analyze 10 important failure distributions to obtain the optimal checkpointing frequency for these distributions. Experimental evaluation shows that our model is highly accurate and deviates from the simulations less than 1% on average.