Pageserver: High-Performance SSD-Based Checkpointing of Transactional Distributed Memory

Abstract

The Rainbow cluster operating system provides fault tolerance by storing incremental checkpoints on a solid state disk (SSD) drive. As the access characteristics of SSD drives differ substantially from those of traditional magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs) new interesting techniques of storing checkpoints in an elegant object-oriented fashion can be applied. The usage of transactional distributed memory (TDM) simplifies the distributed checkpointing algorithm as it automatically guarantees consistent checkpoints of the entire Rainbow cluster without additional coordination overhead.