Transparent Incremental Checkpointing at Kernel Level: A Foundation for Fault Tolerance for Parallel Computers Session: Cluster Environments Event Type: Paper Time: 11:30am - 12:00pm Session Chair: Dongyan Xu Speaker(s): Roberto Gioiosa, Jose Carlos Sancho, Song Jiang, Fabrizio Petrini, Kei Davis Location: 608-609 Abstract: We describe the software architecture, technical features, and performance of TICK (Transparent Incremental Checkpointer at Kernel level), a system-level checkpointer implemented as a kernel thread, specifically designed to provide fault tolerance in Linux clusters. This implementation, based on the 2.6.11 Linux kernel, provides the essential functionality for transparent, highly responsive, and efficient fault tolerance based on full or incremental checkpointing at system level. TICK is completely user-transparent and does not require any changes to user code or system libraries; it is highly responsive: an interrupt, such as a timer interrupt, can trigger a checkpoint in as little as 2.5us; and it supports incremental and full checkpoints with minimal overhead---less than 6% with full checkpointing to disk performed as frequently as once per minute. This paper can be found in the ACM and IEEE Digital Libaries Click here for ACM Click here for IEEE Chair/Speaker Details: Dongyan Xu (Chair) Purdue University Roberto Gioiosa Los Alamos National Laboratory Jose Carlos Sancho LANL Song Jiang LANL Fabrizio Petrini Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Kei Davis LANL