CRM-HLL-VM: A Checkpointing-enabled Java VM for Efficient and Reliable e-Science Applications in Grids∗

Object-oriented programming languages are in current days, the dominant paradigm of application development (mostly Java and.NET languages). Recently, increasingly more Java applications have long (or very long) execution times and manipulate large amounts of data/information, gaining rel-evance in fields related with e-Science (with Grid and Cloud computing). Significant examples include chemistry, com-putational biology and bio-informatics, with many available Java-based APIs (e.g., Neobio). Often, when the execution of one of those applications is terminated abruptly due to a failure (regardless of it be-ing caused by hardware of software fault, lack of available resources,...), all of its work already carried out is simply lost and, when the application is later re-executed, it has to restart its work from scratch, wasting resources and time, and being prone to another failure, to delay its completion with no deadline guarantees. A possible solution to solve these problems, is through mech-anisms of checkpoint and migration. This makes applica-tions more robust and flexible by being able to move to other nodes, without intervention from the programmer. This ar-ticle provides a solution to Java applications with long ex-ecution times, by incorporating such mechanisms in a Java VM (JikesRVM)