Modular Checkpointing for Atomicity

Transient faults that arise in large-scale software systems can often be repaired by re-executing the code in which they occur. Ascribing a meaningful semantics for safe re-execution in multi-threaded code is not obvious, however. For a thread to correctly re-execute a region of code, it must ensure that all other threads which have witnessed its unwanted effects within that region are also reverted to a meaningful earlier state. If not done properly, data inconsistencies and other undesirable behavior may result. However, automatically determining what constitutes a consistent global checkpoint is not straightforward since thread interactions are a dynamic property of the program. In this paper, we present a safe and efficient checkpointing mechanism for Concurrent ML (CML) that can be used to recover nsient faults. We introduce a new linguistic abstraction called stabilizers that permits the specification of per-thread monitors and the restoration of globally consistent checkpoint...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: ENTCS
• Authors: Lukasz Ziarek, Philip Schatz, Suresh Jagannathan
• Keywords: Checkpointing Mechanism, Concurrent ML, ENTCS 2007, Global States