# CRIU -- Checkpoint Restore in Userspace for computational simulations and scientific applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05244 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05244/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Feb 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Guided Search Strategies in Non-Serializable Environments with Applications to Software Engineering Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13652/) (2025)
- [Mid-Harness: Scaling Actions Between Model and Harness for Terminal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39982/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Creating new materials, discovering new drugs, and simulating systems are essential processes for research and innovation and require substantial computational power. While many applications can be split into many smaller independent tasks, some cannot and may take hours or weeks to run to completion. To better manage those longer-running jobs, it would be desirable to stop them at any arbitrary point in time and later continue their computation on another compute resource; this is usually referred to as checkpointing. While some applications can manage checkpointing programmatically, it would be preferable if the batch scheduling system could do that independently. This paper evaluates the feasibility of using CRIU (Checkpoint Restore in Userspace), an open-source tool for the GNU/Linux environments, emphasizing the OSG's OSPool HTCondor setup. CRIU allows checkpointing the process state into a disk image and can deal with both open files and established network connections seamlessly. Furthermore, it can checkpoint traditional Linux processes and containerized workloads. The functionality seems adequate for many scenarios supported in the OSPool. However, some limitations prevent it from being usable in all circumstances.