Efficient Checkpointing of Multi-threaded Applications as a Tool for Debugging, Performance Tuning, and Resiliency
Max Grossman, Vivek Sarkar · 2016
Past work on application checkpointing systems has either focused on enabling application resiliency or as a tool for debugging (as in record-replay literature). Each of these use cases for checkpoints places different constraints on the constructed checkpointing system. When used for resiliency, checkpointing systems must minimize their interference with the running application. When used for record-replay and numerical debugging, checkpointing systems instead must focus on correlating the contents of a checkpoint to user-visible data structures in order to aid in the debugging process. Past literature has ignored the use of checkpoints in application performance tuning. While existing performance profiling tools enable the identification of hotspots in an application, creating full application checkpoints immediately prior to a hotspot enables rapid iteration on the performance of that hotspot. In this paper, we present a checkpointing system for all three of these use cases: resiliency, application debugging, and application performance tuning. We present a novel checkpointing framework that creates efficient checkpoints of multithreaded C programs using a hybrid compile-time and runtime approach. This approach reduces the framework's dependency on platform-specific features and improves its efficiency using insights from static and dynamic application analysis. Across a wide range of benchmarks we demonstrate that our framework incurs low overheads: ~5% on average and in many cases less than 1%.