Performance Evaluation of Fault Tolerance for Parallel Applications in Networked Environments

This paper presents the 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. STAR is application independent, highly configurable and 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. 1. Introduction Few distributed computing environments offer fault management using the natural redundancy of the distributed system and requiring no specific hardware support [1, 14, 17]. STAR was developed to add to the filling of this gap and is built totally outside the operating system. It als..