loading...
 This Article 
   
 Share 
   
 Bibliographic References 
   
 Add to: 
 
Digg
Furl
Spurl
Blink
Simpy
Google
Del.icio.us
Y!MyWeb
 
 Search 
   
19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'05) - Workshop 16
The Effect of Different Failure Recovery Procedures on the Distribution of Task Completion Times
Denver, Colorado
April 04-April 08
ISBN: 0-7695-2312-9
Robert Sheahan, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
Lester Lipsky, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
Pierre Fiorini, University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine
For a system to be reliable, it must have one or more methods of dealing with failures. Distributed systems face both node failure and communication channel failure. Communication channels, in particular, may suffer failures at a very high rate. Different systems respond to task failure in different ways. The system may resume a failed task from the failure point (or a saved checkpoint shortly before the failure point), it may restart the task, or it may give up on the task and select a replacement task from the ready queue. These three responses to failure all change the distribution of task completion times. The distribution of completion times is important because it governs mean service time and queue length, and therefore quality of service and buffer size necessary to manage the risk of overflow. The changes to the distribution introduced by the failure response can even turn well behaved exponentially distributed times into powertail distributed times with infinite mean and variance. In this paper we examine the characteristics of distributions that result from restarting after each interrupt, with some discussion of Resume and Replace, for comparison. We provide analytic and simulation solutions.
Citation:
Robert Sheahan, Lester Lipsky, Pierre Fiorini, "The Effect of Different Failure Recovery Procedures on the Distribution of Task Completion Times," ipdps, vol. 17, pp.282b, 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'05) - Workshop 16, 2005
Usage of this product signifies your acceptance of the Terms of Use.