A Scalable Checkpoint Encoding Algorithm for Diskless Checkpointing

Diskless checkpointing is an efficient technique to save the state of a long running application in a distributed environment without relying on stable storage. In this paper, we introduce several scalable encoding strategies into diskless checkpointing and reduce the overhead to survive k failures in p processes from 2[logp].k((beta + 2gamma)m + alpha) to (1 + O(1/radic(m))).k(beta + 2gamma)m, where a is the communication latency, 1/beta is the network bandwidth between processes, 1/gamma is the rate to perform calculations, and m is the size of local checkpoint per process. The introduced algorithm is scalable in the sense that the overhead to survive k failures in p processes does not increase as the number of processes p increases. We evaluate the performance overhead of the introduced algorithm by using a preconditioned conjugate gradient equation solver as an example. Experimental results demonstrate that the introduced techniques are highly scalable.