PREACHES— portable recovery and checkpointing in heterogeneous systems

Checkpointing in a homogeneous environment, where both checkpointing and recovery are performed on the same type of machine and operating system, has been studied extensively. As heterogeneous distributed sys-tems become pervasive, it is desirable to extend the ca-pability of checkpointing to non-homogeneous environ-ments. This paper describes a prototype, PREACHES, that achieves portable checkpointing of single process appli-cations in heterogeneous systems using checkpoint propa-gation. The checkpoint propagation technique generates machine-dependent checkpoints for each different archi-tecture in the heterogeneous environment. When failure occurs, the failed process can be restarted on a specified machine with the checkpoint that is appropriate for the ar-chitecture. An implementation of PREACHES on a het-erogeneous network of workstations has been successfully developed based on TCP/IP communication. PREACHES also provides automatic and fast recovery for single pro-cess programs.