N-Level Diskless Checkpointing

Diskless checkpointing is an efficient technique to tolerate a small number of processor failures in large parallel and distributed systems. In literature, a simultaneous failure of no more than N processors is often tolerated by using a one-level Reed-Solomon checkpointing scheme for N simultaneous processor failures, whose overhead often increases quickly as N increases. In this paper, we study an N-level diskless checkpointing scheme to reduce the overhead for tolerating a simultaneous failure of no more than N processors by layering the schemes for a simultaneous failure of i processors, where i = 1, 2, . . . ,N. Simulation results indicate the proposed N-level diskless checkpointing scheme achieves lower fault tolerance overhead than the one-level Reed-Solomon checkpointing scheme for N simultaneous processor failures.