Asynchronous Checkpointing by Dedicated Checkpoint Threads

Checkpoint/restart (C/R) is a classical approach to introduce fault tolerance in large HPC applications. Although it is relatively easy as compared to other fault tolerance approaches, its overhead hinders its wide usage. We present an application-level checkpointing technique that significantly reduces the checkpoint overhead. The checkpoint I/O is overlapped with the computation of the application by following a two-stage checkpointing mechanism with dedicated threads for doing I/O.