Technique Properties
There are many different points of view and techniques for achieving application checkpointing. Depending on the specific implementation, a tool can be classified as having several properties:
- Amount of state saved: This property refers to the abstraction level used by the technique to analyze an application. It can range from seeing each application as a black box, hence storing all application data, to selecting specific relevant cores of data in order to achieve a more efficient and portable operation.
- Automatization level: Depending on the effort needed to achieve fault tolerance through the use of a specific checkpointing solution.
- Portability: Whether or not the saved state can be used on different machines to restart the application.
- System architecture: How is the checkpointing technique implemented: inside a library, by the compiler or at operating system level.
Each design decision made affects the properties and efficiency of the final product. For instance, deciding to store the entire application state will allow for a more straightforward implementation, since no analysis of the application will be needed, but it will deny the portability of the generated state files, due to a number of non-portable structures (such as application stack or heap) being stored along with application data.
Read more about this topic: Application Checkpointing
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