MPI-FT: Portable fault tolerance scheme for MPI

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the design and development of a fault tolerant and recovery scheme for the Message Passing Interface (MPI). The proposed scheme consists of a detection mechanism for detecting process failures, and a recovery mechanism. Two different cases are considered, both assuming the existence of a monitoring process, the Observer which triggers the recovery procedure in case of failure. In the first case, each process keeps a buffer with its own message traffic to be used in case of failure, while the implementor uses periodical tests for notification of failure by the Observer. The recovery function simulates all the communication of the processes with the dead one by re-sending to the replacement process all the messages destined for the dead one. In the second case, the Observer receives and stores all message traffic, and sends to the replacement all the buffered messages destined for the dead process. Solutions are provided to the dead communicator problem caused by the death of a process. A description of the prototype developed is provided along with the results of the experiments performed for efficiency and performance.