Fault tolerant cluster computing through replication

Abstract

Long-lived parallel applications running on workstation clusters are vulnerable to single-node or multiple-node failures. Fault recovery is therefore required to prevent immature program termination. However, much of the runtime overhead imposed by fault tolerance schemes is generally due to the cost of transferring the checkpoint states of applications by disk I/O operations. In this paper, we propose a fault tolerant model in which checkpoint states are transferred between replicated parallel applications. We also describe how the resource consumption of the replicated applications can be minimized. The fault tolerant model has been implemented and tested on a workstation cluster and a Fujitsu AP3000 multi-processor machine. The measurements of our experiments have showed that efficient fault tolerance can be achieved by replicating parallel applications on clusters of computers.