Improving Grid Fault Tolerance by Means of Global Behavior Modeling

Grid systems have proved to be one of the most important new alternatives to face challenging problems but, to exploit its benefits, dependability and fault tolerance are key aspects. However, the vast complexity of these systems limits the efficiency of traditional fault tolerance techniques. It seems necessary to distinguish between resource-level fault tolerance (focused on every machine) and service-level fault tolerance (focused on global behavior). Techniques based on these concepts can handle system complexity and increase dependability. We present an autonomous, self-adaptive fault tolerance framework for grid systems, based on a new approach to model distributed environments. The grid is considered as a single entity, instead of a set of independent resources. This point of view focuses on service-level fault tolerance, allowing us to see the big picture and understand the system's global behavior. The resulting model's simplicity is the key to provide system-wide fault tolerance.