Independent checkpointing in a heterogeneous grid environment

The EU-funded XtreemOS project implements an open-source grid operating system based on Linux. In order to provide fault tolerance and migration for grid applications, it integrates a distributed grid-checkpointing service called XtreemGCP. This service is designed to support different checkpointing protocols and to address the underlying gridnode checkpointers (e.g. BLCR, LinuxSSI, OpenVZ, etc.) in a transparent manner through a uniform interface. In this paper, we present the integration of an independent checkpointing and rollback-recovery protocol into the XtreemGCP. The solution we propose is not checkpointer bound and thus can be transparently used on top of any grid-node checkpointer. To evaluate the prototype we run it within a heterogeneous environment composed of single-PC nodes and a Single System Image (SSI) cluster. The experimental results demonstrate the capability of the XtreemGCP service to integrate different checkpointing protocols and independently checkpoint a distributed application within a heterogeneous grid environment. Moreover, the performance evaluation also shows that our solution outperforms the existing coordinated checkpointing protocol in terms of scalability. Keywords-fault tolerance, independent checkpointing, rollbackrecovery, heterogeneity, distributed systems, grid computing.