On checkpointing and heavy-tails in unreliable computing environments

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss checkpointing issues that should be considered whenever jobs execute in unreliable computing environments. Specifically, we show that if proper check-pointing procedures are not properly implemented, then under certain conditions, job completion time distributions exhibit properties of heavy-tail or power-tail distributions (hereafter referred to as power-tail distributions (PT), which can lead to highly-variable and long completion times.