FINDING CONSISTENT GLOBAL CHECKPOINTS IN A DISTRIBUTED COMPUTATION

Consistent global checkpoints have many uses in distributed computatio ns. A central question in applications that use consistent global chec kpoints is to determine whether a consistent global checkpoint that in cludes a given set of local checkpoints can exist. Netzer and Xu [16] presented the necessary and sufficient conditions under which such a c onsistent global checkpoint can exist, but they did not explore what c heckpoints could be constructed. In this paper, we prove exactly which local checkpoints can be used for constructing such consistent global checkpoints. We illustrate the use of our results with a simple and e legant algorithm to enumerate all such consistent global checkpoints.