Portable checkpointing for heterogeneous architectures

Current approaches for checkpointing assume system homogeneity, where checkpointing and recovery are both performed on the same processor architecture and operating system configuration. Sometimes it is desirable or necessary to recover a failed computation on a different processor architecture. For such situations checkpointing and recovery must be portable. In this paper, we argue that source-to-source compilation is an appropriate concept for this purpose. We describe the compilation techniques that we developed for the design of the c2ftc prototype. The c2fte compiler enables machine-independent checkpoints by automatic generation of checkpointing and recovery code. Sequential C programs are compiled into fault tolerant C programs, whose checkpoints can be migrated across heterogeneous networks, and restarted on binary incompatible architectures. Experimental results on several systems provide evidence that the performance penalty of portable checkpointing is negligible for realistic checkpointing frequencies.