A Survey of Fault-Tolerance and Fault-Recovery Techniques in Parallel Systems

Supercomputing systems today often come in the form of large numbers of commodity systems linked together into a computing cluster. These systems, like any distributed system, can have large numbers of independent hardware components cooperating or collaborating on a computation. Unfortunately, any of this vast number of components can fail at any time, resulting in potentially erroneous output. In order to improve the robustness of supercomputing applications in the presence of failures, many techniques have been developed to provide resilience to these kinds of system faults. This survey provides an overview of these various fault-tolerance techniques.Comment: 11 page

CIC : an integrated approach to checkpointing in mobile agent systems

Internet and Mobile Computing Lab (in Department of Computing)Refereed conference paper2006-2007 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference paperVersion of RecordPublishe

Investigation of the applicability of a functional programming model to fault-tolerant parallel processing for knowledge-based systems

In a fault-tolerant parallel computer, a functional programming model can facilitate distributed checkpointing, error recovery, load balancing, and graceful degradation. Such a model has been implemented on the Draper Fault-Tolerant Parallel Processor (FTPP). When used in conjunction with the FTPP's fault detection and masking capabilities, this implementation results in a graceful degradation of system performance after faults. Three graceful degradation algorithms have been implemented and are presented. A user interface has been implemented which requires minimal cognitive overhead by the application programmer, masking such complexities as the system's redundancy, distributed nature, variable complement of processing resources, load balancing, fault occurrence and recovery. This user interface is described and its use demonstrated. The applicability of the functional programming style to the Activation Framework, a paradigm for intelligent systems, is then briefly described

Rollback recovery with low overhead for fault tolerance in mobile ad hoc networks

AbstractMobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have significantly enhanced the wireless networks by eliminating the need for any fixed infrastructure. Hence, these are increasingly being used for expanding the computing capacity of existing networks or for implementation of autonomous mobile computing Grids. However, the fragile nature of MANETs makes the constituent nodes susceptible to failures and the computing potential of these networks can be utilized only if they are fault tolerant. The technique of checkpointing based rollback recovery has been used effectively for fault tolerance in static and cellular mobile systems; yet, the implementation of existing protocols for MANETs is not straightforward. The paper presents a novel rollback recovery protocol for handling the failures of mobile nodes in a MANET using checkpointing and sender based message logging. The proposed protocol utilizes the routing protocol existing in the network for implementing a low overhead recovery mechanism. The presented recovery procedure at a node is completely domino-free and asynchronous. The protocol is resilient to the dynamic characteristics of the MANET; allowing a distributed application to be executed independently without access to any wired Grid or cellular network access points. We also present an algorithm to record a consistent global snapshot of the MANET

Checkpointing in hybrid distributed systems

2003-2004 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference paperVersion of RecordPublishe

Integrated analysis of error detection and recovery

An integrated modeling and analysis of error detection and recovery is presented. When fault latency and/or error latency exist, the system may suffer from multiple faults or error propagations which seriously deteriorate the fault-tolerant capability. Several detection models that enable analysis of the effect of detection mechanisms on the subsequent error handling operations and the overall system reliability were developed. Following detection of the faulty unit and reconfiguration of the system, the contaminated processes or tasks have to be recovered. The strategies of error recovery employed depend on the detection mechanisms and the available redundancy. Several recovery methods including the rollback recovery are considered. The recovery overhead is evaluated as an index of the capabilities of the detection and reconfiguration mechanisms