Peer-to-Peer and Fault-tolerance: Towards Deployment-based Technical Services

International audienceFor effective components, non-functional aspects must be added to the application functional code. Likewise enterprise middleware and component platforms, in the context of Grids, services must be deployed at execution in the component containers in order to implement those aspects without application code modifications. This paper proposes an architecture for defining, configuring, and deploying such Technical Services in a Grid platform

ProActive: an Integrated platform for programming and running applications on grids and P2P systems

International audienceWe propose a grid programming approach using the ProActive middleware. The proposed strategy addresses several grid concerns, which we have classified into three categories. I. Grid Infrastructure which handles the resource acquisition and creation using deployment descriptors and Peer-to-Peer. II. Grid Technical Services which can provide non-functional transparent services like: fault tolerance, load balancing, and file transfer. III. Grid Higher Level programming with: group communication and hierarchical components. We have validated our approach with several grid programming experiences running applications on heterogeneous Grid resource using more than 1000 CPUs

Flexible Rollback Recovery in Dynamic Heterogeneous Grid Computing

Abstract—Large applications executing on Grid or cluster architectures consisting of hundreds or thousands of computational nodes create problems with respect to reliability. The source of the problems are node failures and the need for dynamic configuration over extensive runtime. This paper presents two fault-tolerance mechanisms called Theft-Induced Checkpointing and Systematic Event Logging. These are transparent protocols capable of overcoming problems associated with both benign faults, i.e., crash faults, and node or subnet volatility. Specifically, the protocols base the state of the execution on a dataflow graph, allowing for efficient recovery in dynamic heterogeneous systems as well as multithreaded applications. By allowing recovery even under different numbers of processors, the approaches are especially suitable for applications with a need for adaptive or reactionary configuration control. The low-cost protocols offer the capability of controlling or bounding the overhead. A formal cost model is presented, followed by an experimental evaluation. It is shown that the overhead of the protocol is very small, and the maximum work lost by a crashed process is small and bounded. Index Terms—Grid computing, rollback recovery, checkpointing, event logging. Ç

Fault Tolerance for High-Performance Applications Using Structured Parallelism Models

In the last years parallel computing has increasingly exploited the high-level models of structured parallel programming, an example of which are algorithmic skeletons. This trend has been motivated by the properties featuring structured parallelism models, which can be used to derive several (static and dynamic) optimizations at various implementation levels. In this thesis we study the properties of structured parallel models useful for attacking the issue of providing a fault tolerance support oriented towards High-Performance applications. This issue has been traditionally faced in two ways: (i) in the context of unstructured parallelism models (e.g. MPI), which computation model is essentially based on a distributed set of processes communicating through message-passing, with an approach based on checkpointing and rollback recovery or software replication; (ii) in the context of high-level models, based on a specific parallelism model (e.g. data-flow) and/or an implementation model (e.g. master-slave), by introducing specific techniques based on the properties of the programming and computation models themselves. In this thesis we make a step towards a more abstract viewpoint and we highlight the properties of structured parallel models interesting for fault tolerance purposes. We consider two classes of parallel programs (namely task parallel and data parallel) and we introduce a fault tolerance support based on checkpointing and rollback recovery. The support is derived according to the high-level properties of the parallel models: we call this derivation specialization of fault tolerance techniques, highlighting the difference with classical solutions supporting structure-unaware computations. As a consequence of this specialization, the introduced fault tolerance techniques can be configured and optimized to meet specific needs at different implementation levels. That is, the supports we present do not target a single computing platform or a specific class of them. Indeed the specializations are the mechanism to target specific issues of the exploited environment and of the implemented applications, as proper choices of the protocols and their configurations