Libckpt: Transparent Checkpointing under UNIX

Checkpointing is a simple technique for rollback recovery: the state of an executing program is periodically saved to a disk le from which it can be recovered after a failure. hile recent research has developed a collection of powerful techniques for minimizing the overhead of writing checkpoint les, checkpointing remains unavailable to most application developers. In this paper we describe libckpt, a portable checkpointing tool for Unix 1 that implements all applicable performance optimizations which are reported in the literature. hile libckpt can be used in a mode which is almost totally transparent to the programmer, it also supports the incorporation of user directives into the creation of checkpoints. This user-directed checkpointing is an innovation which is unique to our work.