DMTCP (Supported Apps): Distributed MultiThreaded Checkpointing

DMTCP Supported Apps:

In general, we try to support all mainstream applications and most others. The list below provides a sample of commonly used applications for which we have directly verified support from DMTCP. If your application does not work with DMTCP, this is a bug in DMTCP! We would appreciate it if you can notify us of such applications, so that we can work with you on fixing this bug in DMTCP.

The Closed World Assumption: The single biggest issue for most checkpointing packages is the "closed world assumption". This concerns applications that connect with external services. In these cases, we must add heuristics that know about the external world. Some classic examples are X Window apps, InfiniBand connections, NSCD (Name Service Caching Daemon), LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), re-connecting stdin/stdout/stderr to the current terminal device, and so on. (see the list below.) DMTCP gets around this through heuristics, and DMTCP plugins.

The Three Generations of DMTCP:
DMTCP is now in its third generation, and gains much of its power from the ability to interact with external resources. Here is a short history of DMTCP:

First generation: a single process on a single computer:
This was assumed to be a closed world. Heuristics were added as needed when the external world intruded.
Second generation: distributed processes on a single computer cluster:
This was assumed to be a closed world. Heuristics were added as needed when the external world intruded.
Third generation: distributed applications interacting with the external world:
Applications were allowed to interact with the external world through the implementation of many a plugins--- each one having expertise on how to save and restore an equivalent semantic state for a particular external resource. For example, a database client can disconnect from the server before checkpoint, and reconnect after resume/restart. A database server can delay checkpointing until all current transactions have completed.

Time (rdtsc): Time presents a special case during restart. Any counter or timer active since the beginning of a process will consider the restarted process to be a new process. This can affect the x86/x86_64 assembly instruction rdtsc, which counts the number of clock cycles since the beginning of the process.

Three newer non-POSIX Linux system calls: DMTCP supports three newer Linux system calls (epoll, eventfd, and signalfd) as of DMTCP release 1.2.6.

Work in Progress: Support for inotify will be provided in a future release. Please contact us if you have a need for this.

Some of the commonly used applications supported by DMTCP:

Programming Languages: C/C++, Java, Haskell, Lisp, ...
Parallel Computing: Open MPI, MPICH2, MVAPICH2, Intel® MPI, OpenMP, UPC (Unified Parallel C/C++), Cilk, InfiniBand, SLURM and Torque resource managers, ... (see Parallel Computing page)
Numerical Computing Environments: Matlab, R, Python/Numpy, ...
Scripting and Shell Languages: Python, Perl, dash/bash/tcsh/zsh, screen, ...
Web/Internet: MySQL, PHP, Firefox (see X Window Apps), Apache, ...
Text-based Editors: vi/vim/cscope (vim mouse support not available), emacs, ...
Graphics/X Window Apps: Supported with VNC -- disconnect VNC viewer, and then checkpoint VNC server. Reconnect viewer after resume/restart.
NOTE: We also support direct checkpointing of graphics applications, including 3D graphics based on OpenGL. This uses a contributed pluginThis described here.
Not Supported: Statically Compiled Applications (using libc.a instead of libc.so). Could be supported through use of trampolines. Please contact us if you have an important application.

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DMTCP: Distributed MultiThreaded CheckPointing

DMTCP Supported Apps: