Briefly, according to the invention in an information processing system including a plurality of information processing nodes, a request for checkpointing by an application includes node health criteria (or parameters). The system has the authority to grant or deny the checkpointing request depending on the system health or availability. This scheme significantly improves not only the system performance, but also the application running time as the system. By skipping a checkpoint the application can use the same time to run the application instead of spending extra time for checkpointing.