Recoverable distributed shared virtual memory: memory coherence and storage structures

Abstract

An examination is made of the problem of implementing rollback recovery in multicomputer distributed shared virtual memory environments, in which the shared memory is implemented in software and exists only virtually. A user-transparent checkpointing recovery scheme and a twin-page disk storage management are presented to implement a recoverable distributed shared virtual memory. The checkpointing scheme is integrated with the shared virtual memory management. The twin-page disk approach allows incremental checkpointing without an explicit 'undo' at the time of recovery. A single consistent checkpoint state is maintained on stable disk storage. The recoverable distributed shared virtual memory allows the system to restart computation from a previous checkpoint after a processor failure without a global restart.<>