The development of an efficient checkpointing facility exploiting operating systems services of the GENESIS cluster operating system

Recent research efforts of parallel processing on non-dedicated clusters have focused on high execution performance, parallelism management, transparent access to resources, and making clusters easy to use. However, as a collection of independent computers used by multiple users, clusters are susceptible to failure. This paper shows the development of a coordinated checkpointing facility for the GENESIS cluster operating system. This facility was developed by exploiting existing operating system services. High performance and low overheads are achieved by allowing the processes of a parallel application to continue executing during the creation of checkpoints, while maintaining low demands on cluster resources by using coordinated checkpointing.