A virtual memory translation mechanism to support checkpoint and rollback recovery

Abstract

The authors present a technique that embeds the support for checkpoint and rollback recovery directly into the virtual memory translation hardware. The scheme is general enough to be implemented on various scopes of data such as a portion of an address space, a single address space, or multiple address spaces. A basic model is developed which measures the amount of work required by the scheme as a function of the checkpoint interval size. Using this model, the degree to which the overhead decreases as the interval size increases is shown. Characteristics of several supercomputer applications are shown to agree with the model presented.