Applicationlevel Checkpointing for Shared Memory Programs

Trends in high-performance computing are making it nec-essary for long-running applications to tolerate hardware faults. The most commonly used approach is checkpoint and restart (CPR)- the state of the computation is saved periodically on disk, and when a failure occurs, the compu-tation is restarted from the last saved state. At present, it is the responsibility of the programmer to instrument appli-cations for CPR. Our group is investigating the use of compiler technology to instrument codes to make them self-checkpointing and self-restarting, thereby providing an automatic solution to the problem of making long-running scientific applications resilient to hardware faults. Our previous work focused on message-passing programs. In this paper, we describe such a system for shared-memory programs running on symmetric multiprocessors. This system has two components: (i) a pre-compiler for source-to-source modification of applications, and (ii) a run-time system that implements a protocol for coordinating CPR among the threads of the parallel application. Fo