A method and apparatus for fast backup of a set of compute nodes to save
the state of the software in a parallel computer system. A fast backup
mechanism in the service node of the computer system configures a set of
nodes to be used for a backup and when needed uses the network hardware
to perform a fast backup from node to node from an original set of nodes
to the backup set of nodes. In the preferred embodiments a the fast
backup is done with respect to a midplane or rack of nodes copied to a
backup rack of nodes.