Providing Fault-Tolerance in Unreliable Grid Systems Through Adaptive Checkpointing and Replication

Abstract. As grids typically consist of autonomously managed subsystems with strongly varying resources, fault-tolerance forms an important aspect of the scheduling process of applications. Two well-known techniques for providing fault-tolerance in grids are periodic task checkpointing and replication. Both techniques mitigate the amount of work lost due to changing system availability but can introduce significant run-time overhead. The latter largely depends on the length of checkpointing interval and the chosen number of replicas, respectively. This paper presents a dynamic scheduling algorithm that switches between periodic checkpointing and replication to exploit the advantages of both techniques and to reduce the overhead. Furthermore, several heuristics are discussed that perform on-line adaptive tuning of the checkpointing period based on historical information on resource behavior. Simulationbased comparison of the proposed combined algorithm versus traditional strategies bas...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICCS
• Authors: Maria Chtepen, Filip H. A. Claeys, Bart Dhoedt, Filip De Turck, Peter A. Vanrolleghem, Piet Demeester
• Keywords: Fault-tolerance, ICCS 2007, Periodic Task Checkpointing, Significant Run-time Overhead