Checkpointing Process Groups in a Grid Environment

John Mehnert-Spahn (1) , Michael Schoettner (1) , Christine Morin (2)

1 Institut für Informatik [Düsseldorf]
2 PARIS - Programming distributed parallel systems for large scale numerical simulation

The EU-funded XtreemOS project implements a grid operating system transparently exploiting resources of virtual organizations through the standard POSIX interface. Grid checkpointing and restart requires to save and restore jobs executing in a distributed heterogeneous grid environment. The latter may spawn millions of grid nodes ( PCs, clusters, and mobile devices ) using different system-specific checkpointers saving and restoring application and kernel data structures for processes executing on a grid node. In this paper we shortly describe the XtreemOS grid checkpointing architecture and how we bridge the gap between the abstract grid and the system-specific checkpointers. Then we discuss how we keep track of processes and how different process grouping techniques are managed to ensure that all processes of a job and any further dependent ones can be checkpointed and restarted. Finally, we present how Linux control groups can be used to address resource isolation issues during the restart.

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

John Mehnert-Spahn, Michael Schoettner, Christine Morin. Checkpointing Process Groups in a Grid Environment. Proc. of the 9th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDCAT '08), Dec 2008, Dunedin, New Zealand. pp.243 - 251, ⟨10.1109/PDCAT.2008.14⟩. ⟨hal-01271213⟩