CPPC: A compiler–assisted tool for portable checkpointing of message-passing applications

With the evolution of high-performance computing towards heterogeneous, massively par-allel systems, parallel applications have developed new fault tolerance necessities. Check-pointing has become a widely used technique to obtain fault tolerance. Whether due to a failure in the execution or to a migration of the processes to different machines, checkpoint-ing tools must be able to operate in heterogeneous environments. Portable checkpointers usually work around portability issues at the cost of transparency: the user must provide in-formation as what data needs to be stored, where to store it, or where to checkpoint. CPPC (Controller/Precompiler for Portable Checkpointing) is a checkpointing tool designed to fea-ture both portability and transparency. It is made up of a library containing checkpointing routines and a compiler which automates the use of the library. This paper gives an overview of the CPPC tool. Experimental results using benchmarks and large-scale real applications are included, demonstrating usability, efficiency and portability.