The work reported in this paper is motivated towards validating an alternative approach for fault tolerance over traditional methods like checkpointing that constrain efficacious fault tolerance. Can agent intelligence be used to achieve fault tolerant parallel computing systems? If so, "What agent capabilities are required for fault tolerance?", "What parallel computational tasks can benefit from such agent capabilities?" and "How can agent capabilities be implemented for fault tolerance?" need to be addressed. Cognitive capabilities essential for achieving fault tolerance through agents are considered. Parallel reduction algorithms are identified as a class of algorithms that can benefit from cognitive agent capabilities. The Message Passing Interface is utilized for implementing an intelligent agent based approach. Preliminary results obtained from the experiments validate the feasibility of an agent based approach for achieving fault tolerance in parallel computing systems.
@cite_17: Mobile agents have attracted considerable interest in recent years. In the context of mobile agents, fault tolerance is crucial to enable the integration of mobile agent technology into today's business applications. To further develop mobile agent technology, reliability mechanisms such as fault tolerance and transaction support are required. For this purpose, we first identify two basic requirements for fault-tolerant mobile agent execution: (1) non-blocking (i.e., a single failure does not prevent progress of the mobile agent execution); and (2) exactly-once (i.e., multiple executions of the agent are prevented). To achieve fault tolerance for the agent system, especially for the agent transfer to a new host, we use distributed transaction processing. This paper proposes a novel approach to fault-tolerant mobile agent execution, which is based on modeling agent execution as a sequence of agreement problems. Each agreement problem is one instance of the well-understood consensus problem. Our solution does not require a perfect failure detection mechanism, while preventing blocking and ensuring that the agent is executed exactly once
Fifthly, in mobile agent technology, checkpointing can prevent the loss of an agent and prevent blocking. In this case single failure does not prevent the progress of a mobile agent execution. However, checkpointing does not satisfy the exactly-once property, leading to multiple executions of an agent @cite_17 .