Checkpoint-restart with different code

[Greg Bronevetsky]

I see that there's been some discussion on this list on checkpointing 
techniques that may be included in gdb. My research group at Cornell is 
working on a number of such checkpointers for both sequential and 
parallel programs and we recently decided to try a more challenging 
variant of checkpointing where the user can take a checkpoint of their 
program, modify their source code a bit (add remove stack variables, 
move function calls around a bit and a few other things) and then resume 
computation using the modified code. This seems to be very useful for 
debugging long-running applications since the user would be able to work 
around the bug without losing a week's or month's worth of results. (can 
happen in high-performance computing) Similarly, its useful for 
situations where your execution is in some particularly buggy corner 
case and you want to keep making modifications and trying them out 
without having to guide the program's execution back into that corner 
case after every code change.

My question is, has anybody heard of anything that can do this? 
Obviously, this kind of checkpointing would require compiler support, so 
gdb wouldn't have done this, but have you heard of any systems/research 
that has addressed this question? Thanks.

-- 
Greg Bronevetsky
490 Rhodes Hall
Cornell University