2013/10/31 by Aupy, Guillaume, Anne Benoît, Thomas Hérault +8
Computer Science · Engineering · #Distributed #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #Radiation Effects in Electronics #Real-Time Systems Scheduling #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1310.8486
openalex publication_date 2013/10/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we revisit traditional checkpointing and rollback recovery strategies, with a focus on silent data corruption errors. Contrarily to fail-stop failures, such latent errors cannot be detected immediately, and a mechanism to detect them must be provided. We consider two models: (i) errors are detected after some delays following a probability distribution (typically, an Exponential distribution); (ii) errors are detected through some verification mechanism. In both cases, we compute the optimal period in order to minimize the waste, i.e., the fraction of time where nodes do not perform useful computations. In practice, only a fixed number of checkpoints can be kept in memory, and the first model may lead to an irrecoverable failure. In this case, we compute the minimum period required for an acceptable risk. For the second model, there is no risk of irrecoverable failure, owing to the verification mechanism, but the corresponding overhead is included in the waste. Finally, both models are instantiated using realistic scenarios and application/architecture parameters.