Speculation Meets Checkpointing

Abstract

Abstract. This paper describes a checkpointing mechanism destined for Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) systems with speculative prefetching. Speculation is a general technique involving prediction of the future of a computation, namely accesses to shared objects unavailable on the accessing node (read faults). Thanks to such predictions objects can be fetched before the actual access operation is performed, resulting, at least potentially, in considerable performance improvement. The proposed mechanism is based on independent incremental checkpointing integrated with a coherence protocol introducing little overhead. It ensures the consistency of checkpoints, allowing fast recovery from failures.