The Stanford Software Research Lunch is a weekly event on Thursday where students and researchers present their latest work to peers. Talks are open to anybody, but regular attendees are expected to give a presentation on their work. Members of the Computer Forum are especially welcome.
Mailing list: software-research-lunch@lists.stanford.edu (subscribe via mailman)
Calendar: ical
Format: The lunch is held every week during fall, winter and spring quarter. The first week of every quarter is an organizational lunch where people can sign up to give a talk. If you'd like to give a talk, please contact Rupanshu Soi.
Past quarters: Spring 2026, Winter 2026, Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Winter 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Winter 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Winter 2023, Fall 2022, Winter 2021, Fall 2020, Winter 2020, Fall 2019, Spring 2019, Winter 2019, Fall 2018, Spring 2018, Winter 2018, Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Winter 2017, Fall 2016.
Ordering Food: For suggestions for those ordering food for the lunch, see here.
10/1: Relight: Simple User-Level Checkpointing and Fast-Forward Replay for Distributed Task-Based Systems
Time: Thursday, October 1, 2026, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: Elliott Slaughter
Abstract: Checkpointing, or periodic saving of program state to storage, is the de facto standard technique used to mitigate risks of nondeterministic bugs, hardware faults, and job wall-time limits in long-running programs. Traditional approaches require users to manually manage the migration of data to and from storage when capturing checkpoints and when resuming execution. However, for task-based programs, where the user has already factored the computation into tasks and the program data into collections, sufficient information is available to automatically capture and resume from checkpoints with minimal code changes. We present Relight, the first framework for automatic, distributed checkpointing of task-based programs that provides an efficient fast-forward replay for full job recovery. On a set of already-optimized benchmarks, we demonstrate that Relight delivers checkpointing performance and scalability comparable to the original, unmodified codes when running on up to 512 nodes of the Piz Daint supercomputer.
Food: