April 15, 2006
Journal Article

SFT: Scalable Fault Tolerance

Abstract

In this paper we will present a new technology that we are currently developing within the SFT: Scalable Fault Tolerance FastOS project which seeks to implement fault tolerance at the operating system level. Major design goals include dynamic reallocation of resources to allow continuing execution in the presence of hardware failures, very high scalability, high efficiency (low overhead), and transparency—requiring no changes to user applications. Our technology is based on a global coordination mechanism, that enforces transparent recovery lines in the system, and TICK, a lightweight, incremental checkpointing software architecture implemented as a Linux kernel module. TICK is completely user-transparent and does not require any changes to user code or system libraries; it is highly responsive: an interrupt, such as a timer interrupt, can trigger a checkpoint in as little as 2.5µs; and it supports incremental and full checkpoints with minimal overhead—less than 6% with full checkpointing to disk performed as frequently as once per minute.

Revised: October 24, 2007 | Published: April 15, 2006

Citation

Petrini F., J. Nieplocha, and V. Tipparaju. 2006. SFT: Scalable Fault Tolerance. Operating Systems Review 40, no. 2:55 - 62. PNNL-SA-52256.