Fault-Tolerant Parallel Applications with Dynamic Parallel Schedules

Commodity computer clusters are often composed of hundreds of computing nodes. These generally off-the-shelf systems are not designed for high reliability. Node failures therefore drive the MTBF of such clusters to unacceptable levels. The software frameworks used for running parallel applications need to be fault-tolerant in order to ensure continued execution despite node failures. We propose an extension to the flow graph based Dynamic Parallel Schedules (DPS) development framework that allows non-trivial parallel applications to pursue their execution despite node failures. The proposed fault-tolerance mechanism relies on a set of backup threads located in the volatile storage of alternate nodes. These backup threads are kept up to date by duplication of the transmitted data objects and periodical checkpointing of thread states. In case of a failure, the current state of the threads that were on the failed node is reconstructed on the backup threads by re-executing operations. The...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Sebastian Gerlach, Roger D. Hersch
• Keywords: Backup Thread, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Execution Despite Node, IPPS 2005, Node Failures