Relaxing consistency in recoverable distributed shared memory

Abstract

Relaxed memory consistency models tolerate increased memory access latency in both hardware and software distributed shared memory systems. In recoverable systems, relaxing consistency has the added benefit of reducing the number of checkpoints needed to avoid rollback propagation. In this paper, we introduce new checkpointing algorithms that take advantage of relaxed consistency to reduce the performance overhead of checkpointing. We also introduce a scheme based on lazy relaxed consistency, that reduces both checkpointing overhead and the overhead of avoiding error propagation in systems with error latency. We use multiprocessor address traces to evaluate the relaxed consistency approach to checkpointing with distributed shared memory.