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Thread Migration/Checkpointing for Type-Unsafe C Programs

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High Performance Computing - HiPC 2003 (HiPC 2003)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2913))

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Abstract

Thread migration/checkpointing is becoming indispensable for load balancing and fault tolerance in high performance computing applications, and its success depends on the migration/checkpointing-safety, which concerns the construction of an accurate computation state. This safety is hard to guard in some languages, such as the C, whose type-unsafe features may cause the dynamic types associated with memory segments to be totally different from the static types declared in programs. To overcome this, we propose a novel intra-procedural, flow-insensitive, and context-insensitive pointer inference algorithm to systematically detect and recover unsafe factors. The proposed scheme conducts a thorough static analysis at compile time and inserts a minimized set of primitives to reduce the overhead of possible dynamic checks at run-time. Consequently, most unsafe features will be removed. Programmers can then code in any style, and nearly every program will be qualified for migration/checkpointing.

This research was supported in part by NSF IGERT grant 9987598, NSF MRI grant 9977815, and NSF ITR grant 0081696.

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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Jiang, H., Chaudhary, V. (2003). Thread Migration/Checkpointing for Type-Unsafe C Programs. In: Pinkston, T.M., Prasanna, V.K. (eds) High Performance Computing - HiPC 2003. HiPC 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2913. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24596-4_50

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24596-4_50

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20626-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-24596-4

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