Adaptive Checkpointing Scheme Research Articles

Avoiding Data Inconsistency in Energy Harvesting Powered Embedded Systems

Energy harvesting is becoming a favorable alternative to power future generation embedded systems, as it is more environmentally and user friendly. However, energy harvesting powered embedded systems suffer from frequent execution interruption due to unstable energy supply. To tackle this problem, nonvolatile memory has been deployed to save the whole volatile state for computation. When power resumes, the processor can restore the state back to volatile memories and continue execution. However, without careful consideration, the process of checkpointing and resuming could cause inconsistency between volatile and nonvolatile memories, which leads to irreversible errors. In this article, we propose a consistency-aware adaptive checkpointing scheme that ensures correctness for all checkpoints. The proposed technique efficiently identifies all possible inconsistency positions in programs and inserts auxiliary code to ensure correctness by offline analysis. In addition, adaptive checkpointing assisted register file profiling and online tracking techniques further reduce the overhead of each checkpoint. Evaluation results show that the proposed checkpointing strategy can successfully eliminate inconsistency errors and greatly reduce the checkpointing overhead.

동시 결함 검출 기능이 있는 실시간 제어 시스템의 결함 허용성을 위한 적응형 체크포인팅 기법

The checkpointing scheme is a well-known technique to cope with transient faults in digital systems. This paper proposes an adaptive checkpointing scheme for the reliability improvement of real-time control systems with concurrent fault detection capability. With concurrent fault detection capability the effect of transient faults are assumed to be detected with no latency. The proposed adaptive checkpointing scheme is based on the reliability analysis of an equidistant checkpointing scheme. Numerical data show the proposed adaptive scheme outperforms the equidistant scheme from a reliability point of view.

Adaptive Checkpointing (Invited Paper)

Checkpointing is a typical approach to tolerate failures in today’s supercomputing clusters and computational grids. Checkpoint data can be saved either in central stable storage, or in processor memory (as in diskless checkpointing), or local disk space (replacing memory with local disk in diskless checkpointing). But where to save the checkpoint data has a great impact on the performance of a checkpointing scheme. Fault tolerance schemes with higher efficiency usually choose to save the checkpoint data closer to the processor. However, when failures are handled from application level, the storage hierarch of a platform is often not available at the fault tolerance scheme design time. Therefore, it is often difficult to decide which checkpointing schemes to choose at the application design time. In this paper, we demonstrate that, a good fault tolerance efficiency can be achieved by adaptively choosing where to store the checkpoint data at run time according to the specific characteristics of the platform. We analyze the performance of different checkpointing schemes and propose an efficient adaptive checkpointing scheme to incorporate fault tolerance into high performance computing applications.

실시간 제어 시스템의 결함 허용성을 위한 적응형 체크포인팅 기법

The checkpointing scheme is a well-known technique to cope with transient faults in digital systems. This paper proposes an adaptive checkpointing scheme for the reliability improvement of real-time control systems. The proposed adaptive checkpointing scheme is based on the previous work about the reliability problem of an equidistant checkpointing scheme. For the derivation of the adaptive scheme, some conditions are introduced which are to be satisfied for the reliability improvement by exploiting an equidistant checkpointing scheme. Numerical data show the proposed adaptive scheme outperforms the equidistant scheme from a reliability point of view.

Dynamic adaptation for fault tolerance and power management in embedded real-time systems

Safety-critical embedded systems often operate in harsh environmental conditions that necessitate fault-tolerant computing techniques. In addition, many safety-critical systems execute real-time applications that require strict adherence to task deadlines. These embedded systems are also energy-constrained, since system lifetime is determined largely by the battery lifetime. In this paper, we investigate dynamic adaptation techniques based on checkpointing and dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) for fault tolerance and power management. We first present schedulability tests that provide the criteria under which checkpointing can provide fault tolerance and real-time guarantees. We then present an adaptive checkpointing scheme in which the checkpointing interval for a task is dynamically adjusted during execution, and checkpoints are inserted based not only on the available slack, but also on the occurrences of faults. Next, we combine adaptive checkpointing with DVS to achieve power reduction. Finally, we develop an adaptive checkpointing scheme for a set of multiple tasks in real-time systems. An offline preprocessing based on linear programming is used to determine the parameters that are provided as inputs to the online adaptive checkpointing procedure. Simulation results show that compared to previous methods, the proposed adaptive checkpointing approach increases the likelihood of timely task completion in the presence of faults. When combined with DVS, adaptive checkpointing also leads to considerable energy savings.

An adaptive checkpointing scheme for distributed databases with mixed types of transactions

A checkpointing algorithm that is noninterfering with transaction processing is presented. It prevents the well-known domino effect and saves the intermediate results of a long-lived transaction in an adaptive manner, managing effectively both short- and long-lived transactions in the system.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>