Checkpoint

3 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  checkpoint \checkpoint\ n.
     a place (as at a frontier) where travellers are stopped for
     inspection and clearance.
     [WordNet 1.5]

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:



  checkpoint
       n : a place (as at a frontier) where travellers are stopped for
           inspection and clearance

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:

  checkpoint
       
          Saving the current state of a program and its data, including
          intermediate results to disk or other {non-volatile storage},
          so that if interrupted the program could be restarted at the
          point at which the last checkpoint occurred.  This facility
          came into popular use in {mainframe} {operating systems}s such
          as {OS/360} in which programs frequently ran for longer than
          the mean time between system failures.  If a program run fails
          because of some event beyond the program's control
          (e.g. hardware or {operating system} failure) then the
          processor time invested before the checkpoint will not have
          been wasted.
       
          (1995-02-07)