article

Stabilizers: a modular checkpointing abstraction for concurrent functional programs

Authors:

Suresh JagannathanAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 41, Issue 9

Pages 136 - 147

https://doi.org/10.1145/1160074.1159822

Published: 16 September 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Transient faults that arise in large-scale software systems can often be repaired by re-executing the code in which they occur. Ascribing a meaningful semantics for safe re-execution in multi-threaded code is not obvious, however. For a thread to correctly rexecute a region of code, it must ensure that all other threads which have witnessed its unwanted effects within that region are also reverted to a meaningful earlier state. If not done properly, data inconsistencies and other undesirable behavior may result. however, automatically determining what constitutes a consistent global checkpoint is not straightforward since thread interactions are a dynamic property of the program.In this paper, we present a safe and efficient checkpointing mechanism for Concurrent ML (CML) that can be used to recover from transient faults. We introduce a new linguistic abstraction called stabilizers that permits the specification of per-thread monitors and the restoration of globally consistent checkpoints. Safe global states are computed through lightweight monitoring of communication events among threads (e.g. message-passing operations or updates to shared variables).Our experimental results on several realistic, multithreaded, server-style CML applications, including a web server and a windowing toolkit, show that the overheads to use stabilizers are small, and lead us to conclude that they are a viable mechanism for defining safe checkpoints in concurrent functional programs.

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Cited By

Kuang PField JVarela CBoix EHaller PRicci AVarela C(2014)Fault Tolerant Distributed Computing Using Asynchronous Local CheckpointingProceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Programming based on Actors Agents & Decentralized Control10.1145/2687357.2687364(81-93)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2687357.2687364
Spaccasassi CKoutavas V(2013)Towards Efficient Abstractions for Concurrent ConsensusRevised Selected Papers of the 14th International Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming - Volume 832210.1007/978-3-642-45340-3_5(76-90)Online publication date: 14-May-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-45340-3_5
Harmanci DGramoli VFelber P(2011)Atomic boxesProceedings of the 25th European conference on Object-oriented programming10.5555/2032497.2032538(634-657)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2011
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Stabilizers: a modular checkpointing abstraction for concurrent functional programs

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 41, Issue 9

Proceedings of the 2006 ICFP conference

September 2006

296 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1160074

Issue’s Table of Contents

ICFP '06: Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
September 2006
308 pages
ISBN:1595933093
DOI:10.1145/1159803
General Chair:
John Reppy
University of Chicago, USA
,
Program Chair:
Julia Lawall
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 16 September 2006

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 41, Issue 9

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Cited By

Kuang PField JVarela CBoix EHaller PRicci AVarela C(2014)Fault Tolerant Distributed Computing Using Asynchronous Local CheckpointingProceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Programming based on Actors Agents & Decentralized Control10.1145/2687357.2687364(81-93)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2687357.2687364
Spaccasassi CKoutavas V(2013)Towards Efficient Abstractions for Concurrent ConsensusRevised Selected Papers of the 14th International Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming - Volume 832210.1007/978-3-642-45340-3_5(76-90)Online publication date: 14-May-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-45340-3_5
Harmanci DGramoli VFelber P(2011)Atomic boxesProceedings of the 25th European conference on Object-oriented programming10.5555/2032497.2032538(634-657)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2032497.2032538
Lesani MPalsberg J(2011)Communicating memory transactionsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2038037.194157746:8(157-168)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2038037.1941577
Lesani MPalsberg JCascaval CYew P(2011)Communicating memory transactionsProceedings of the 16th ACM symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming10.1145/1941553.1941577(157-168)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1941553.1941577
Harmanci DGramoli VFelber P(2011)Atomic Boxes: Coordinated Exception Handling with Transactional MemoryECOOP 2011 – Object-Oriented Programming10.1007/978-3-642-22655-7_29(634-657)Online publication date: 2011
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22655-7_29
Fluet MBergstrom LFord NRainey MReppy JShaw AXiao Y(2009)Programming in Manticore, a heterogenous parallel functional languageProceedings of the Third summer school conference on Central European functional programming school10.5555/1939128.1939132(94-145)Online publication date: 21-May-2009
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Ziarek LSivaramakrishnan KJagannathan S(2009)Partial memoization of concurrency and communicationACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1631687.159657544:9(161-172)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2009
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Ziarek LSivaramakrishnan KJagannathan SHutton GTolmach A(2009)Partial memoization of concurrency and communicationProceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming10.1145/1596550.1596575(161-172)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2009
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Effinger-Dean LKehrt MGrossman DHook JThiemann P(2008)Transactional events for MLProceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming10.1145/1411204.1411222(103-114)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2008
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