Fail-safe PVM: A portable package for distributed programming with transparent recovery

Many scientific problems benefit from computations that are parallel at a coarse grain. Collections of loosely-coupled, heterogeneous computers are increasingly being applied to these problems. While individual computers are designed to be relatively reliable, a collection of several autonomous machines necessarily has a greater rate of failure. As data networks improve, and larger multicomputers are being used, rates of failure will increase. PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) [Sun90, GS92] is a popular software framework that facilitates message-passing network programming. We present enhancements to PVM to mask fail-stop, single-node failures from the application. Fail-safe PVM uses checkpoint and rollback to recover from such failures. Both checkpoints and rollbacks are transparent to the application if the application does not depend on real-time events. Recovery occurs without wait for repair of the failed computer. The system does not rely on shared stable storage and does not require ..