Checkpointing distributed shared memory

Distributed shared memory (DSM) is a very promising programming model for exploiting the parallelism of distributed memory systems, because it provides a higher level of abstraction than simple message passing. Although the nodes of standard distributed systems exhibit high crash rates only very few DSM environments have some kind of support for fault-tolerance. In this article, we present a checkpointing mechanism for a DSM system that is efficient and portable. It offers some portability because it is built on top of MPI and uses only the services offered by MPI and a POSIX compliant local file system. As far as we know, this is the first real implementation of such a scheme for DSM. Along with the description of the algorithm we present experimental results obtained in a cluster of workstations. We hope that our research shows that efficient, transparent and portable checkpointing is viable for DSM systems.