Efficient Process Checkpointing through Fine-Grained COW Management in New Memory based Systems

Jay H. Park, Young Je Moon, Sam H. Noh

http://doi.org/

We design and implement a process-based fault recovery system to increase the reliability of new memory based computer systems. A rollback point is made at every context switch to which a process can rollback to upon a fault. In this study, a clone process of the original process, which we refer to as a P-process (Persistent-process), is created as a rollback point. Such a design minimizes losses when a fault does occur. Specifically, first, execution loss can be minimized as rollback points are created only at context switches, which bounds the lost execution. Second, as we make use of the COW (Copy-On-Write）mechanism, only those parts of the process memory state that are modified (in page units) are copied decreasing the overhead for creating the P-process. Our experimental results show that the overhead is approximately 5% in 8 out of 11 PARSEC benchmark workloads when P-process is created at every context switch time. Even for workloads that result in considerable overhead, we show that this overhead can be reduced by increasing the P-process generation interval.