BlobCR: Efficient checkpoint-restart for HPC applications on IaaS clouds using virtual disk image snapshots

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing is gaining significant interest in industry and academia as an alternative platform for running scientific applications. Given the dynamic nature of IaaS clouds and the long runtime and resource utilization of such applications, an efficient checkpoint-restart mechanism becomes paramount in this context. This paper proposes a solution to the aforementioned challenge that aims at minimizing the storage space and performance overhead of checkpoint-restart. We introduce an approach that leverages virtual machine (VM) disk-image multi-snapshotting and multi-deployment inside checkpoint-restart protocols running at guest level in order to efficiently capture and potentially roll back the complete state of the application, including file system modifications. Experiments on the G5K testbed show substantial improvement for MPI applications over existing approaches, both for the case when customized checkpointing is available at application level and the case when it needs to be handled at process level.