High availability for parallel computers

• Main Authors: Dolores Rexachs del Rosario, Emilio Luque Fadón
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Postgraduate Office, School of Computer Science, Universidad Nacional de La Plata 2010-10-01
• Series: Journal of Computer Science and Technology
• Subjects: fault tolerance; availability; radic; transient faults; performability
• Online Access: https://journal.info.unlp.edu.ar/JCST/article/view/697

Fault tolerance has become an important issue for parallel applications in the last few years. The parallel systems' users want them to be reliable considering two main dimensions, availability and data consistency. Availability can be provided with solutions such as RADIC, a fault tolerant architecture with different protection levels, offering high availability with transparency, decentralization, flexibility and scalability for message-passing systems. Transient faults may cause an application running in a computer system to be removed from execution, however the biggest risk of transient faults is to provoke undetected data corruption that changes the final result of the application without anyone knowing. To evaluate the effects of transient faults in the robustness of applications and validate new fault detection mechanism and strategies, we have developed a full-system simulation fault injection environment