Checkpoints for large jobs

[William Craven]

We have a large number of long running background jobs on the Sequent
Symmetry at Sussex University. Over the last few weeks we were having
to frequently reboot the system. This of course killed the long running
jobs and hence the users had to rerun their jobs. With the frequent
rebooting it was beginning to annoy these users very much as they had to
keep on rerunning their jobs and hence delaying getting their results.

Because of this I was wondering whether there is a system which will allow
a job to start off from when it last killed either by means of checkpointing
or setjmp/longjmp. If there is such a scheme I would be grateful for pointers.

As a side issue - can one reload the core file into a process ? If so
how.

Many thanks,

William Craven

UNIX Systems,			william at syma.sussex.ac.uk
Computing Service		+44-273-606755 ext 2970
University of Sussex
Brighton, BN1 9QJ
United Kingdom