Checkpointing Process Groups in a Grid Environment

Abstract

The EU-funded XtreemOS project implements a grid operating system transparently exploiting resources of virtual organizations through the standard POSIX interface. Grid checkpointing and restart requires to save and restore jobs executing in a distributed heterogeneous grid environment. The latter may spawn millions of grid nodes ( PCs, clusters, and mobile devices ) using different system-specific checkpointers saving and restoring application and kernel data structures for processes executing on a grid node. In this paper we shortly describe the XtreemOS grid checkpointing architecture and how we bridge the gap between the abstract grid and the system-specific checkpointers. Then we discuss how we keep track of processes and how different process grouping techniques are managed to ensure that all processes of a job and any further dependent ones can be checkpointed and restarted. Finally, we present how Linux control groups can be used to address resource isolation issues during the restart.