• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.19-26
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• 2010

In this paper, we adopt Storage Class Memory, which is next-generation non-volatile RAM technology, as part of main memory parallel to DRAM, and exploit the SCM+DRAM main memory system from the dependability perspective. Our system provides instant system on/off without bootstrapping, dynamic selection of process persistence or non-persistence, and fast recovery from power and/or software failure. The advantages of our system are that it does not cause the problems of checkpointing, i.e., heavy overhead and recovery delay. Furthermore, as the system enables full application transparency, our system is easily applicable to real-world environments. As proof of the concept, we implemented a system based on a commodity Linux kernel 2.6.21 operating system. We verify that the persistence enabled processes continue to execute instantly at system off-on without any state and/or data loss. Therefore, we conclude that our system can improve availability and reliability.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.132-138
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• 2017

We design and implement a process-based fault recovery system to increase the reliability of new memory based computer systems. A rollback point is made at every context switch to which a process can rollback to upon a fault. In this study, a clone process of the original process, which we refer to as a P-process (Persistent-process), is created as a rollback point. Such a design minimizes losses when a fault does occur. Specifically, first, execution loss can be minimized as rollback points are created only at context switches, which bounds the lost execution. Second, as we make use of the COW (Copy-On-Write）mechanism, only those parts of the process memory state that are modified (in page units) are copied decreasing the overhead for creating the P-process. Our experimental results show that the overhead is approximately 5% in 8 out of 11 PARSEC benchmark workloads when P-process is created at every context switch time. Even for workloads that result in considerable overhead, we show that this overhead can be reduced by increasing the P-process generation interval.