Global snapshots for distributed debugging

The widespread adoption of distributed computing has accentuated the need for an effective set of support tools to facilitate debugging and monitoring. In providing such support, one fundamental problem is that of constructing a global snapshot or global state of a distributed computation. This paper examines global snapshot algorithms from a distributed debugging perspective, and proposes an abstract framework based on global snapshots, which is defined to form a consistent state of the entire system. It is shown that by using a property preserving algorithm, this framework can be superimposed on the underlying computation, but not interfere with it