An expert system for analysis of consistency criteria in checkpointing algorithms

In a distributed computing environment, it is vital to maintain the states of the processes involved in order to cater to failures that are arbitrary in nature. To reach a consistent state among all the processes, checkpoints are taken locally by each process and are combined together based on uniformity criteria such as consistency, transitlessness, and strong consistency. In this article, first, the necessary and sufficient conditions of consistency criteria are stated and then an expert system, implemented based on these criteria, is presented. The expert system discovers and illustrates consistent, transitless, strongly consistent and globally consistent checkpoints in a given distributed system. Moreover, it offers facilities for evaluating checkpointing algorithms by measuring different quality assessment parameters.