An efficient causal logging scheme for recoverable distributed shared memory systems

This paper presents a causal logging scheme for the lazy release consistent distributed shared memory systems. Causal logging is a very attractive approach to provide the fault tolerance for the distributed systems, since it eliminates the need of stable logging. However, since inter-process dependency must causally be transferred with the normal messages, the excessive message overhead has been a drawback of this approach. In order to achieve an efficient implementation of causal logging for the distributed shared memory system, data structures and operations supported by the lazy release consistency memory model are utilized. As a result, the causal logging for the lazy release consistent distributed shared memory system can be implemented by adding the minimum information for the dependency tracking. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, the proposed logging scheme has been implemented on top of the CVM distributed shared memory system. The experimental results show that the logging operation requires only 1% 4.4% increases in the execution time. Keywords– Checkpointing, Distributed shared memory systems, Fault tolerant systems, Message logging, Lazy release consistency, Rollback-recovery. ————————————– An earlier version of this work has appeared in the Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, 2000.