Handling single node failures using agents in computer clusters

Varghese, B., McKee, G. T. and Alexandrov, V. N. (2010) Handling single node failures using agents in computer clusters. In: Proceedings of the 2010 International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems. Society for Modeling and Simulation International, San Diego, USA, pp. 96-101. ISBN 9781565553408

Abstract/Summary

The work reported in this paper is motivated towards handling single node failures for parallel summation algorithms in computer clusters. An agent based approach is proposed in which a task to be executed is decomposed to sub-tasks and mapped onto agents that traverse computing nodes. The agents intercommunicate across computing nodes to share information during the event of a predicted node failure. Two single node failure scenarios are considered. The Message Passing Interface is employed for implementing the proposed approach. Quantitative results obtained from experiments reveal that the agent based approach can handle failures more efficiently than traditional failure handling approaches.