Optimal Placement of Application-Level Checkpoints

One of the basic problems related to the efficient application-level checkpointing is the placement of checkpoints in the source codes. In this paper we discuss two common questions with a source-to-source precompiler ALEC: 1) if there are N checkpoints in the application´s source code, how to pick M checkpoints out of them minimizing the total amount of checkpoint data? 2) if there are no checkpoint in the application´s source code, how to insert a set of checkpoints minimizing the amount of checkpoint data? We reveal that these two questions can both be abstracted as a mathematic model which is similar to the 0-1 integer programming model, and the model can be solved using implicit enumeration method. The solving methods proposed in the paper have been implemented and integrated into ALEC. Experimental results show that the method is efficient.