Distributed Recovery in Applicative Systems

Applicative systems are promising candidates for achieving high performance computing through aggregation of processors. This paper studies the fault recovery problems in a class of applicative systems. The concept of functional checkpointing is proposed as the nucleus of a distributed recovery mechanism. This entails incrementally building a resilient structure as the evaluation of an applicative program proceeds. A simple rollback algorithm is suggested to regenerate the corrupted structure by redoing the most effective functional checkpoints. Another algorithm, which attempts to recover intermediate results, is also presented. The parent of a faulty task reproduces a functional twin of the failed task. The regenerated task inherits all offspring of the faulty task so that partial results can be salvaged