Man vs. Machine: Comparing Handwritten and Compiler-generated Application-Level Checkpointing∗

The contributions of this paper are the following. • We describe the implementation of the C3 system for semi-automatic application-level checkpointing of C programs. The system has (i) a pre-compiler that instruments C programs so that they can save their states at program execution points spec-ified by the user, and (ii) a novel memory allocator that manages the heap as a collection of pools. • We describe two static analyses for reducing the overhead of sav-ing and restoring the application state. The first one optimizes stack variables, while the second one optimizes heap data struc-tures. • To benchmark our system, we compare the overheads introduced by our semi-automatic approach with the overhead of handwrit-ten application-level checkpointing in an n-body code written by Joshua Barnes. Except for very small problem sizes, these overheads are comparable