Transparent adaptive library-based checkpointing for master-worker style parallelism

We present a transparent, system-level checkpointing solution for master-worker parallelism that automatically adapts, upon restart, to the number of processor nodes available. This is important, since nodes in a cluster fail. It also allows one to adapt to using multiple cluster partitions and multiple resources from the computational grid, as they become available. Checkpointing a master-worker computation has the additional advantage of needing to checkpoint only the master process. This is both fast and more economical of disk space. This has been demonstrated by checkpointing Geant4, a million line C++ program. Our solution has been implemented in the context of TOP-C (task oriented parallel C/C++), a free, open-source parallel package, although it can easily be ported to additional master-worker packages.