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Fault-tolerant atomic computations in an object-based distributed system

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Abstract

A distributed system can support fault-tolerant applications by replicating data and computation at nodes that have independent failure modes. We present a scheme called parallel execution threads (PET) which can be used to implement fault-tolerant computations in an object-based distributed system. In a system that replicates objects, the PET scheme can be used to replicate a computation by creating a number of parallel threads which execute with different replicas of the invoked objects. A computation can be completed successfully if at least one thread does not encounter any failed nodes and its completion preserves the consistency of the objects. The PET scheme can tolerate failures that occur during the execution of the computation as long as all threads are not affected by the failures. We present the algorithms required to implement the PET scheme and also address some performance issues.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology, 30332, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Mustaque Ahamad, Partha Dasgupta & Richard J. LeBlanc Jr.

Authors
  1. Mustaque Ahamad
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  2. Partha Dasgupta
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  3. Richard J. LeBlanc Jr.
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Additional information

Mustaque Ahamad received his B.E. (Hons.) degree in Electrical Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. He obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1983 and 1985 respectively. Since September 1985, he is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. His research interests include distributed operating systems, distributed algorithms, faulttolerant systems and performance evaluation.

Partha Dasgupta is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech since 1984. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the technical project director of the Clouds distributed operating systems project, as well as a coprincipal investigator of Georgia Tech's NSF-CER award. His research interests include building distributed operating systems, distributed algorithms, fault-tolerant systems and distributed programming support.

Richard J. LeBlanc, Jr. received the B.S. degree in physics from Louisiana State University in 1972 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1974 and 1977, respectively. He is currently a Professor in the School of Information and Computer Science of the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include programming language design and implementation, programming environments, and software engineering. Dr. LeBlanc's current research work involves application of these interests in distributed processing systems. As co-director of the Clouds Project, he is studying language concepts and software engineering methodology for utilizing a highly reliable, object-based distributed system. He is also interested in specification-based software development methodologies and tools. Dr. LeBlanc is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the IEEE Computer Society and Sigma Xi.

This work was supported in part by NSF grants CCR-8619886 and CCR-8806358, and RADC contract number F30602-86-C-0032

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Ahamad, M., Dasgupta, P. & LeBlanc, R.J. Fault-tolerant atomic computations in an object-based distributed system. Distrib Comput 4, 69–80 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01786632

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01786632

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