Checkpointing

Some recipes and tips for checkpointing on the B4F HPC

Definition

Checkpointing: Saving the program's state at a checkpoint with the aim to restart it from that point in case of (un)planned stop of failure.

It is interesting for, e.g., long jobs that could be (un)voluntary killed, or jobs running on unstable computing systems.

Two types of program

The code is accessible

Recipe

Modify the code to implement the following recipe:

1. Look for a state file that includes all imformation required to restore the state when the program was stopped.
2. If it exists, read it and restore the state. Else, create an intial state.
3. Periodically save the state to the state file.