Transparent checkpoints of closed distributed systems in Emulab

Emulab is a testbed for networked and distributed systems experimentation. Two guiding principles of its design are realism and control of experimentation. There is an inherent tension between these goals, however, and in some aspects of the testbed’s design, Emulab’s implementers favored realism over control. Thus, Emulab provides wide-ranging control over an experiment’s environment and initial conditions, but relatively little control over its execution—in particular, the ability to suspend, preempt, or replay the experiment. We have extended Emulab with a new means of control over experiment execution: the ability to cleanly checkpoint the execution of the set of nodes and networks that comprise an experiment. Conventional checkpoint mechanisms can easily degrade the fidelity of experiment results as a consequence of checkpoint downtimes, overheads of background state saving, and unintended distributed checkpoint synchronization effects. In this paper we demonstrate a che...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: EUROSYS
• Authors: Anton Burtsev, Prashanth Radhakrishnan, Mike Hibler, Jay Lepreau
• Keywords: Checkpoint Mechanism, Conventional Checkpoint Mechanisms, EUROSYS 2009, System Software, Unintended Distributed Checkpoint