A Memory-mapped Approach to Checkpointing
Dongsheng Wong, USDOE, G. Lloyd, M. Gokhale · 2013
We present a lightweight method of checkpointing application-specified persistent data structures to files.With this method, the programmer marks static variables that need to be persistent with a PERM qualifier, and uses a persistent variant of a dynamic memory allocator.Static and dynamic persistent data structures reside in a memory-mapped file.At checkpoint time, persistent variables and structures are synced to their associated files.Our method offers a new level of very fast, lightweight checkpoint particularly suitable for node local storage.The checkpoint files can be used by other internode or global checkpoint schemes such as Scalable Checkpoint and Restart (SCR).We describe the checkpoint mechanism and evaluate its performance.