2003Unpublished venueRequires access

The performance of consistent checkpointing

E. N. Mootaz Elnozahy, David B. Johnson, Willy Zwaenepoel

Open publisher page 355 citations

Abstract

Consistent checkpointing provides transparent fault tolerance for long-running distributed applications. Performance measurements of an implementation of consistent checkpointing are described. The measurements show that consistent checkpointing performs remarkably well. Eight computation-intensive distributed applications were executed on a network of 16 diskless Sun-3/60 workstations, and the performance without checkpointing was compared to the performance with consistent checkpoints taken at two-minute intervals. For six of the eight applications, the running time increased by less than 1% as a result of the checkpointing. The highest overhead measured was 5.8%. Incremental checkpointing and copy-on write checkpointing were the most effective techniques in lowering the running time overhead. It is argued that these measurements show that consistent checkpointing is an efficient way to provide fault tolerance for long-running distributed applications.>

About this research paper

What this paper is about

Consistent checkpointing provides transparent fault tolerance for long-running distributed applications. Performance measurements of an implementation of consistent checkpointing are described. The measurements show that consistent checkpointing performs remarkably well. Eight computation-intensive distributed applications were executed on a network of 16 diskless Sun-3/60 workstations, and the performance without checkpointing was compared to the performance with consistent checkpoints taken at two-minute intervals. For six of the eight applications, the running time increased by less than 1% as a result of the checkpointing. The highest overhead measured was 5.8%. Incremental checkpointing and copy-on write checkpointing were the most effective techniques in lowering the running time overhead. It is argued that these measurements show that consistent checkpointing is an efficient way to provide fault tolerance for long-running distributed applications.>

Why it matters

OpenAlex reports 355 citations for this work. Citation counts describe recorded attention and do not establish research quality.

Key contribution

A contribution statement is not available in the OpenAlex record.

Method / approach

Method details are not available in the OpenAlex metadata.

Main findings

Findings are not separately available in the OpenAlex metadata.

Limitations

Limitations are not available in the OpenAlex metadata.

Applications

Application details are not available in the OpenAlex metadata.

Available abstract

Consistent checkpointing provides transparent fault tolerance for long-running distributed applications. Performance measurements of an implementation of consistent checkpointing are described. The measurements show that consistent checkpointing performs remarkably well. Eight computation-intensive distributed applications were executed on a network of 16 diskless Sun-3/60 workstations, and the performance without checkpointing was compared to the performance with consistent checkpoints taken at two-minute intervals. For six of the eight applications, the running time increased by less than 1% as a result of the checkpointing. The highest overhead measured was 5.8%. Incremental checkpointing and copy-on write checkpointing were the most effective techniques in lowering the running time overhead. It is argued that these measurements show that consistent checkpointing is an efficient way to provide fault tolerance for long-running distributed applications.>

Key concepts: Overhead (engineering), Fault tolerance, Computer science, Computation, Parallel computing, Workstation, Running time, Distributed computing

Related papers

Back to paper searchBrowse research topicsOriginal source
The performance of consistent checkpointing — Research Paper | ScholarLens