An approach to rollback recovery of collaborating mobile agents

Fault-tolerance is one of the main problems that must be resolved to improve the adoption of the agents' computing paradigm. In this paper, we analyse the execution model of agent platforms and the significance of the faults affecting their constituent components on the reliable execution of agent-based applications, in order to develop a pragmatic framework for agent systems fault-tolerance. The developed framework deploys a communication-pairs independent check pointing strategy to offer a low-cost, application-transparent model for reliable agent- based computing that covers all possible faults that might invalidate reliable agent execution, migration and communication and maintains the exactly-one execution property

Scalable group-based checkpoint/restart for large-scale message-passing systems

The ever increasing number of processors used in parallel computers is making fault tolerance support in large-scale parallel systems more and more important. We discuss the inadequacies of existing system-level checkpointing solutions for message-passing applications as the system scales up. We analyze the coordination cost and blocking behavior of two current MPI implementations with checkpointing support. A group-based solution combining coordinated checkpointing and message logging is then proposed. Experiment results demonstrate its better performance and scalability than LAM/MPI and MPICH-VCL. To assist group formation, a method to analyze the communication behaviors of the application is proposed. ©2008 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

A survey of checkpointing algorithms for parallel and distributed computers

Checkpoint is defined as a designated place in a program at which normal processing is interrupted specifically to preserve the status information necessary to allow resumption of processing at a later time. Checkpointing is the process of saving the status information. This paper surveys the algorithms which have been reported in the literature for checkpointing parallel/distributed systems. It has been observed that most of the algorithms published for checkpointing in message passing systems are based on the seminal article by Chandy and Lamport. A large number of articles have been published in this area by relaxing the assumptions made in this paper and by extending it to minimise the overheads of coordination and context saving. Checkpointing for shared memory systems primarily extend cache coherence protocols to maintain a consistent memory. All of them assume that the main memory is safe for storing the context. Recently algorithms have been published for distributed shared memory systems, which extend the cache coherence protocols used in shared memory systems. They however also include methods for storing the status of distributed memory in stable storage. Most of the algorithms assume that there is no knowledge about the programs being executed. It is however felt that in development of parallel programs the user has to do a fair amount of work in distributing tasks and this information can be effectively used to simplify checkpointing and rollback recovery

Checkpointing of parallel applications in a Grid environment

The Grid environment is generic, heterogeneous, and dynamic with lots of unreliable resources making it very exposed to failures. The environment is unreliable because it is geographically dispersed involving multiple autonomous administrative domains and it is composed of a large number of components. Examples of failures in the Grid environment can be: application crash, Grid node crash, network failures, and Grid system component failures. These types of failures can affect the execution of parallel/distributed application in the Grid environment and so, protections against these faults are crucial. Therefore, it is essential to develop efficient fault tolerant mechanisms to allow users to successfully execute Grid applications. One of the research challenges in Grid computing is to be able to develop a fault tolerant solution that will ensure Grid applications are executed reliably with minimum overhead incurred. While checkpointing is the most common method to achieve fault tolerance, there is still a lot of work to be done to improve the efficiency of the mechanism. This thesis provides an in-depth description of a novel solution for checkpointing parallel applications executed on a Grid. The checkpointing mechanism implemented allows to checkpoint an application at regions where there is no interprocess communication involved and therefore reducing the checkpointing overhead and checkpoint size

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

Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Nondeterministic Applications

All practical applications contain some degree of nondeterminism. When such applications are replicated to achieve Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), their nondeterministic operations must be controlled to ensure replica consistency. To the best of our knowledge, only the most simplistic types of replica nondeterminism have been dealt with. Furthermore, there lacks a systematic approach to handling common types of nondeterminism. In this paper, we propose a classification of common types of replica nondeterminism with respect to the requirement of achieving Byzantine fault tolerance, and describe the design and implementation of the core mechanisms necessary to handle such nondeterminism within a Byzantine fault tolerance framework.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, 200

Using Rollback Avoidance to Mitigate Failures in Next-Generation Extreme-Scale Systems

High-performance computing (HPC) systems enable scientists to numerically model complex phenomena in many important physical systems. The next major milestone in the development of HPC systems is the construction of the first supercomputer capable executing more than an exaflop, 10^18 floating point operations per second. On systems of this scale, failures will occur much more frequently than on current systems. As a result, resilience is a key obstacle to building next-generation extreme-scale systems. Coordinated checkpointing is currently the most widely-used mechanism for handling failures on HPC systems. Although coordinated checkpointing remains effective on current systems, increasing the scale of today\u27s systems to build next-generation systems will increase the cost of fault tolerance as more and more time is taken away from the application to protect against or recover from failure. Rollback avoidance techniques seek to mitigate the cost of checkpoint/restart by allowing an application to continue its execution rather than rolling back to an earlier checkpoint when failures occur. These techniques include failure prediction and preventive migration, replicated computation, fault-tolerant algorithms, and software-based memory fault correction. In this thesis, I examine how rollback avoidance techniques can be used to address failures on extreme-scale systems. Using a combination of analytic modeling and simulation, I evaluate the potential impact of rollback avoidance on these systems. I then present a novel rollback avoidance technique that exploits similarities in application memory. Finally, I examine the feasibility of using this technique to protect against memory faults in kernel memory

Space Reclamation for Uncoordinated Checkpointing in Message-Passing Systems

Checkpointing and rollback recovery are techniques that can provide efficient recovery from transient process failures. In a message-passing system, the rollback of a message sender may cause the rollback of the corresponding receiver, and the system needs to roll back to a consistent set of checkpoints called recovery line. If the processes are allowed to take uncoordinated checkpoints, the above rollback propagation may result in the domino effect which prevents recovery line progression. Traditionally, only obsolete checkpoints before the global recovery line can be discarded, and the necessary and sufficient condition for identifying all garbage checkpoints has remained an open problem. A necessary and sufficient condition for achieving optimal garbage collection is derived and it is proved that the number of useful checkpoints is bounded by N(N+1)/2, where N is the number of processes. The approach is based on the maximum-sized antichain model of consistent global checkpoints and the technique of recovery line transformation and decomposition. It is also shown that, for systems requiring message logging to record in-transit messages, the same approach can be used to achieve optimal message log reclamation. As a final topic, a unifying framework is described by considering checkpoint coordination and exploiting piecewise determinism as mechanisms for bounding rollback propagation, and the applicability of the optimal garbage collection algorithm to domino-free recovery protocols is demonstrated