ResPCT: Fast Checkpointing in Non-volatile Memory for Multi-threaded Applications

Abstract

Non-volatile memory (NVMM) technologies are a great opportunity to build fast fault-tolerant programs, as they provide persistent storage in main memory. However, since the processor caches remain volatile, solutions are needed to recover a consistent state from NVMM after a crash. This paper presents ResPCT, a checkpointing approach to make multi-threaded programs fault tolerant, by flushing persistent data structures to NVMM periodically. ResPCT uses In-Cache-Line logging to efficiently track modifications during failure-free execution, and to restore a consistent state after a crash. The ResPCT API enables programmers to position restart points in their program, which simplifies the identification of the persistent program state and can also help improving performance. Experiments with representative benchmarks and applications, show that ResPCT can outperform state-of-the-art solutions by up to 2.7×, and that its overhead can be as low as 4% at large core count.