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FRASystem: fault tolerant system using agents in distributed computing systems

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a fault tolerant and recovery system called FRASystem (Fault Tolerant & Recovery Agent System) using multi-agent in distributed computing systems. Previous rollback-recovery protocols were dependent on an inherent communication and an underlying operating system, which caused a decline of computing performance. We propose a rollback-recovery protocol that works independently on an operating system and leads to an increasing portability and extensibility. We define four types of agents: (1) a recovery agent performs a rollback-recovery protocol after a failure, (2) an information agent constructs domain knowledge as a rule of fault tolerance and information during a failure-free operation, (3) a facilitator agent controls the communication between agents, (4) a garbage collection agent performs garbage collection of the useless fault tolerance information. Since agent failures may lead to inconsistent states of a system and a domino effect, we propose an agent recovery algorithm. A garbage collection protocol addresses the performance degradation caused by the increment of saved fault tolerance information in a stable storage. We implemented a prototype of FRASystem using Java and CORBA and experimented the proposed rollback-recovery protocol. The simulations results indicate that the performance of our protocol is better than previous rollback-recovery protocols which use independent checkpointing and pessimistic message logging without using agents. Our contributions are as follows: (1) this is the first rollback-recovery protocol using agents, (2) FRASystem is not dependent on an operating system, and (3) FRASystem provides a portability and extensibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Computer Science and Engineering, Soonchunhyang University, Asan-si, 336-745, Korea

    HwaMin Lee & DooSoon Park

  2. Dept. of Computer Science Education, Korea University, 1, 5-Ka, Anam-Dong, Sungbuk-Ku, Seoul, Korea

    HeonChang Yu

  3. Research and Development Center, Saman Corporation, Anyang, 431-050, Korea

    Giyeol Lee

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  1. HwaMin Lee
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  2. DooSoon Park
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  3. HeonChang Yu
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  4. Giyeol Lee
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Correspondence to HwaMin Lee.

Additional information

This work was supported by the Soonchunhyang University Research Fund 20080152.

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Lee, H., Park, D., Yu, H. et al. FRASystem: fault tolerant system using agents in distributed computing systems. Cluster Comput 14, 15–25 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-009-0095-x

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