A useless checkpoint is a local checkpoint that cannot be part of a consistent global checkpoint. This paper addresses the following problem. Given a set of processes that take (basic) local checkpoints in an independent and unknown way, the problem is to design communicationinduced checkpointing protocols that direct processes to take additional local (forced) checkpoints to ensure no local checkpoint is useless.The paper first proves two properties related to integer timestamps which are associated with each local checkpoint. The first property is a necessary and sufficient condition that these timestamps must satisfy for no checkpoint to be useless. The second property provides an easy timestamp-based determination of consistent global checkpoints. Then, a general communication-induced checkpointing protocol is proposed. This protocol, derived from the two previous properties, actually defines a family of timestampbased communication-induced checkpointing protocols. It is shown that several existing checkpointing protocols for the same problem are particular instances of the general protocol. The design of this general protocol is motivated by the use of communication-induced checkpointing protocols in "consistent global checkpoint"-based distributed applications such as the detection of stable or unstable properties and the determination of distributed breakpoints.

Considering an application in which processes take local checkpoints independently (called basic checkpoints), this paper develops a protocol that forces them to take some additional local checkpoints (called forced checkpoints) in order that the resulting checkpoint and communication pattern satisfies the Rollback Dependency Trackability (RDT) property. This property states that all dependencies between local checkpoints are on-line trackable by using a transitive dependency vectol:Compared to other protocols ensuring the RDT property, the proposed protocol is less conservative in the sense that it takes less additional local checkpoints. It attains this goal by a subtle tracking of causal dependencies on already taken checkpoints; this tracking is then used to prevent the occurrence of hidden dependencies. As indicated by simulation study, the proposed protocol compares favorably with other protocols; moreovec it additionally associates on-the-jly with each local checkpoint G the minimum global checkpoint to which C belongs.

AbstractÐA Global Data is a vector with one entry per process. Each entry must be filled with an appropriate value provided by the corresponding process. Several distributed computing problems amount to compute a function on a global data. This paper proposes a protocol to solve such problems in the context of asynchronous distributed systems where processes may fail by crashing. The main problem that has to be solved lies in computing the global data and in providing each noncrashed process with a copy of it, despite the possible crash of some processes. To be consistent, the global data must contain, at least, all the values provided by the processes that do not crash. This defines the Global Data Computation (GDC) problem. To solve this problem, processes execute a sequence of asynchronous rounds during which they construct, in a decentralized way, the value of the global data and eventually each process gets a copy of it. To cope with process crashes, the protocol uses a perfect failure detector. The proposed protocol has been designed to be time efficient: it allows early decision. Let t be the maximum number of processes that may crash, t`n where n is the total number of processes, and f be the actual number of process crashes (f t). In the worst case, the protocol terminates in minPf PY t I rounds. Moreover, the protocol does not require processes to exchange information on their perception of crashes. The message size depends only on the size of the global data.