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The STAR fault manager for distributed operating environments. design, implementation and performance

✍ Scribed by Pierre Sens; Bertil Folliot


Publisher
John Wiley and Sons
Year
1998
Tongue
English
Weight
225 KB
Volume
28
Category
Article
ISSN
0038-0644

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✦ Synopsis


This paper presents the design, implementation and performance evaluation of a software fault manager for distributed applications. Dubbed Star, it uses the natural redundancy existing in networks of workstations to offer a high level of fault tolerance. Fault management is transparent to the supported parallel applications. To improve the response time of fault-tolerant applications, Star implements non-blocking and incremental checkpointing to perform an efficient backup of process state. Moreover, Star is application independent, highly configurable. Star actually runs on top of SunOs and is easily portable to UNIX™-like operating systems. The current implementation is based on independent checkpointing and message logging. Measurements show the efficiency and the limits of this implementation. The challenge is to show that a software approach to fault tolerance can efficiently be implemented in a standard networked environment.