Enhanced Sender-Based Message Logging for Reducing Forced Checkpointing Overhead in Distributed Systems

Abstract

The previous communication-induced checkpointing may considerably induce worthless forced checkpoints because each process receiving messages cannot obtain sufficient information related to non-causal Z-paths. This paper presents an enhanced sender-based message logging protocol applicable to any communication-induced checkpointing to lead to a high decrease of the forced checkpointing overhead of communicationinduced checkpointing in an effective way while permitting no useless checkpoint. The protocol allows each process sending a message to know the exact timestamp of the receiver of the message in its logging procedures without any extra message. Simulation verifies their great efficiency of overhead alleviation regardless of communication patterns.

Scalable Communication-Induced Checkpointing Protocol with Little Overhead for Distributed Computing Environments

“…Most existing CIC protocols [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]14,15] have been designed to ensure that no basic checkpoint becomes useless by satisfying Theorem 2 at all times.…”

“…In addition, if needed before message delivery, additional checkpoints, called forced checkpoints, can be taken based on the local variables of the process and the information piggybacked on the messages [2]. Most CIC protocols [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] with these advantages have the following common behavioral features. If each process recognizes the delivery of a message may make any other local checkpoint of another process, called a basic checkpoint, become useless, the protocols make the process take a forced checkpoint.…”

“…CIC protocols are classified into two types, model-based CIC and timestamp-based CIC [1]. Although model-based protocols [3,4] may be transformed to their corresponding timestamp-based ones [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15], the overhead of the first, in its eagerness to break suspicious message exchange patterns, can be considerably higher than that of the second in terms of the number of forced checkpoints [1]. Timestamp-based protocols have continuously advanced with their protocol-specific checkpoint timestamping schemes using Lamport's logical clock to decrease the number of forced checkpoints in the following manner.…”

“…Although developed to operate based on a reliable first-in, first-out (hereafter, FIFO) communication channel, most traditional CIC protocols [3][4][5][6][7][8][10][11][12][13][14][15] do not use this advantageous feature to lessen this sort of forced checkpointing overhead. A previous CIC protocol [9] attempted to decrease the number of forced checkpoints by obtaining the up-to-date local clock of the next checkpoint of every other process based on performing sender-based message logging earlier than before. However, the protocol may not only generate a few extra control messages but may also greatly lengthen the latency of message sending.…”

“…For this purpose, the information is piggybacked on the acknowledgment of each application message essential to ensuring communication reliability, which requires no additional control message. In addition, it allows each process to perform actual message sending operations right after receiving messages without any delay, unlike the existing protocols [9]. Moreover, the protocol is never constrained by the piecewise deterministic execution model because it does not utilize message logging.…”