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Fault tolerant processes

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Abstract

A process is said to be fault tolerant if the system provides proper service despite the failure of the process. For supporting fault-tolerant processes, measures have to be provided to recover messages lost due to the failure. One approach for recovering messages is to use message-logging techniques. In this paper, we present a model for message-logging based schemes to support fault-tolerant processes and develop conditions for proper message recovery in asynchronous systems. We show that requiring messages to be recovered in the same order as they were received before failure is a stricter requirement than necessary. We then propose a distributed scheme to support fault-tolerant processes that can also handle multiple process failures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, 20742, College Park, MD, USA

    Pankaj Jalote

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  1. Pankaj Jalote
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Pankaj Jalote received the Bachelor of Technology degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, in 1980, the M.S. degree in computer science from Pennsylvania State University, University Park, in 1982, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985. From August 1985 to July 1989 he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. Currently he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur, India. His research interests include fault-tolerant computing, distributed systems, and software engineering.

This work was supported in parts by the NSF grant DCI-8610337

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Jalote, P. Fault tolerant processes. Distrib Comput 3, 187–195 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01784887

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