A survey and review of the current state of rollback‐recovery for cluster systems

A variety of research problems exist that require considerable time and computational resources to solve. Attempting to solve these problems produces long‐running applications that require a reliable and trustworthy system upon which they can be executed. Cluster systems provide an excellent environment upon which to run these applications because of their low cost to performance ratio; however, due to being created using commodity components they are prone to failures. This report surveyed and reviewed the issues currently relating to providing fault tolerance for long‐running applications. Several fault tolerance approaches were investigated; however, it was found that rollback‐recovery provides a favourable approach for user applications in cluster systems. Two facilities are required to provide fault tolerance using rollback‐recovery: checkpointing and recovery. It was shown here that a multitude of work has been done for enhancing checkpointing; however, the intricacies of providing recovery have been neglected. The problems associated with providing recovery include; providing transparent and autonomic recovery, selecting appropriate recovery computers, and maintaining a consistent observable behaviour when an application fails. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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