Consistent state restoration in shared memory systems

Abstract

In many systems, backward recovery constitutes a classical technique to ensure fault-tolerance. It consists in restoring a computation in a consistent global state, saved in a global checkpoint, from which this computation can be resumed. A global checkpoint includes a set of local checkpoints, one from each process which correspond to local states dumped onto stable storage. In this paper we are interested in defining formally the domino effect for shared memory systems be the shared memory a physical one (as in multiprocessor systems) or a virtual one (as in distributed shared memory systems) and in designing a domino-free adaptive algorithm. These results lie on a necessary and sufficient condition which shows when a set of local checkpoints can belong to some consistent global checkpoint.