MPICH-GF: Transparent Checkpointing and Rollback-Recovery for Grid-Enabled MPI Processes

Abstract

Fault-tolerance is an essential element to the distributed system which requires the reliable computation environment. In spite of extensive researches over two decades, practical fault-tolerance systems have not been provided. It is due to the high overhead and the unhandiness of the previous fault-tolerance systems. In this paper, we propose MPICH-GF, a user-transparent checkpointing system for grid-enabled MPICH. Our objectives are to fill the gap between the theory and practice of fault-tolerance systems and to provide a checkpointing-recovery system for grids. To build a fault-tolerant MPICH version, we have designed task migration, dynamic process management for MPI and message queue management. MPICH-GF requires no modification of application source codes and affects the MPICH communication as less as possible. The features of MPICH-GF are that it supports the direct message transfer mode and that all of the implementation has been done at the lower layer, that is, the virtual device level. We have evaluated MPICH-GF with NPB applications on Globus middleware.