The average availability of parallel checkpointing systems and its importance in selecting runtime parameters

Performance prediction of checkpointing systems in the presence of failures is a well-studied research area. While the literature abounds with performance models of checkpointing systems, none address the issue of selecting runtime parameters other than the optimal checkpointing interval. In particular the issue of processor allocation is typically ignored. In this paper we briefly present it performance model for long-running parallel computations that execute with checkpointing enabled. We then discuss how it is relevant to today´s parallel computing environments and software, and present case studies of using the model to select runtime parameters.