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_9: As the size of large-scale computer systems increases, their mean-time-between-failures are becoming significantly shorter than the execution time of many current scientific applications. To complete the execution of scientific applications, they must tolerate hardware failures. Conventional rollback-recovery protocols redo the computation of the crashed process since the last checkpoint on a single processor. As a result, the recovery time of all protocols is no less than the time between the last checkpoint and the crash. In this paper, we propose a new application-level fault-tolerant approach for parallel applications called the fault-tolerant parallel algorithm (FTPA), which provides fast self-recovery. When fail-stop failures occur and are detected, all surviving processes recompute the workload of failed processes in parallel. FTPA, however, requires the user to be involved in fault tolerance. In order to ease the FTPA implementation, we developed get it fault-tolerant (GiFT), a source-to-source precompiler tool to automate the FTPA implementation. We evaluate the performance of FTPA with parallel matrix multiplication and five kernels of NAS Parallel Benchmarks on a cluster system with 1,024 CPUs. The experimental results show that the performance of FTPA is better than the performance of the traditional checkpointing approach.
Fourthly, most checkpoint strategies require a cold restart, that is, a complete reload of all processes associated with the parallel job @cite_9 . In this case, processors that did not suffer a failure might also require a reload of the process executing on it.