Efficient Diskless Checkpointing and Log Based Recovery Schemes

Checkpointing and message logging are the popular and generalpurpose tools for providing fault tolerance in distributed systems. Diskless checkpointing schemes enable frequent checkpointing without a performance penalty. The present work extends James S Plank‟s Diskless checkpointing scheme (N+1 Parity) by introducing ‘Timeout’ mechanism to checkpoint programs with high locality of reference. This mechanism enables applications with high locality of reference to take checkpoints periodically. The limitation of N+1 Parity scheme is that all the processes freeze their respective computation, while taking synchronous checkpoints. The proposed scheme solves this problem by introducing a new message logging technique namely partial message logging which allows asynchronous checkpointing at both sender and receiver. Correctness of the scheme is established through a set of proofs. This paper includes the performance evaluation of proposed scheme by making use of distributed simulator test-bed. The results indicate that proposed scheme outperforms N+1 Parity Scheme.