158 research outputs found
Optimal discrimination between transient and permanent faults
An important practical problem in fault diagnosis is discriminating between permanent faults and transient faults. In many computer systems, the majority of errors are due to transient faults. Many heuristic methods have been used for discriminating between transient and permanent faults; however, we have found no previous work stating this decision problem in clear probabilistic terms. We present an optimal procedure for discriminating between transient and permanent faults, based on applying Bayesian inference to the observed events (correct and erroneous results). We describe how the assessed probability that a module is permanently faulty must vary with observed symptoms. We describe and demonstrate our proposed method on a simple application problem, building the appropriate equations and showing numerical examples. The method can be implemented as a run-time diagnosis algorithm at little computational cost; it can also be used to evaluate any heuristic diagnostic procedure by compariso
Improving Scalability of Application-Level Checkpoint-Recovery by Reducing Checkpoint Sizes
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in New Generation Computing. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00354-013-0302-4[Abstract] The execution times of large-scale parallel applications on nowadays multi/many-core systems are usually longer than the mean time between failures. Therefore, parallel applications must tolerate hardware failures to ensure that not all computation done is lost on machine failures. Checkpointing and rollback recovery is one of the most popular techniques to implement fault-tolerant applications. However, checkpointing parallel applications is expensive in terms of computing time, network utilization and storage resources. Thus, current checkpoint-recovery techniques should minimize these costs in order to be useful for large scale systems. In this paper three different and complementary techniques to reduce the size of the checkpoints generated by application-level checkpointing are proposed and implemented. Detailed experimental results obtained on a multicore cluster show the effectiveness of the proposed methods to reduce checkpointing cost.Ministerio de Ciencia e InnovaciĂłn; TIN2010-16735Galicia. ConsellerĂa de EconomĂa e Industria; 10PXIB105180P
A Dual Digraph Approach for Leaderless Atomic Broadcast (Extended Version)
Many distributed systems work on a common shared state; in such systems,
distributed agreement is necessary for consistency. With an increasing number
of servers, these systems become more susceptible to single-server failures,
increasing the relevance of fault-tolerance. Atomic broadcast enables
fault-tolerant distributed agreement, yet it is costly to solve. Most practical
algorithms entail linear work per broadcast message. AllConcur -- a leaderless
approach -- reduces the work, by connecting the servers via a sparse resilient
overlay network; yet, this resiliency entails redundancy, limiting the
reduction of work. In this paper, we propose AllConcur+, an atomic broadcast
algorithm that lifts this limitation: During intervals with no failures, it
achieves minimal work by using a redundancy-free overlay network. When failures
do occur, it automatically recovers by switching to a resilient overlay
network. In our performance evaluation of non-failure scenarios, AllConcur+
achieves comparable throughput to AllGather -- a non-fault-tolerant distributed
agreement algorithm -- and outperforms AllConcur, LCR and Libpaxos both in
terms of throughput and latency. Furthermore, our evaluation of failure
scenarios shows that AllConcur+'s expected performance is robust with regard to
occasional failures. Thus, for realistic use cases, leveraging redundancy-free
distributed agreement during intervals with no failures improves performance
significantly.Comment: Overview: 24 pages, 6 sections, 3 appendices, 8 figures, 3 tables.
Modifications from previous version: extended the evaluation of AllConcur+
with a simulation of a multiple datacenters deploymen
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