Global States of a Distributed System
Michael J. Fischer, Nancy D. Griffeth, Nancy Ann Lynch · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · 1982
A global state of a distributed transaction system is consistent if no transactions are in progress. A global checkpoint is a transaction which must view a globally consistent system state for correct operation. We present an algorithm for adding global checkpoint transactions to an arbitrary distributed transaction system. The algorithm is nonintrusive in the sense that checkpoint transactions do not interfere with ordinary transactions in progress; however, the checkpoint transactions still produce meaningful results.