A Coarse-Grained Pessimistic Message Logging Scheme for Improving Rollback Recovery Efficiency

As a common technology for fault tolerance and load balance, rollback-recovery faces the challenges of scalability and inherent variability in those long-running large-scale applications with grids as the computing infrastructure. Among the rollback recovery schemes, pessimistic message logging protocols (PMLPs) and coordinated checkpointing protocols (CCPs) are the most popular in practice. Although PMLPs are good in scalability, their fault-free overhead sometimes is prohibitive. CCPs introduce relatively lower overhead, but they are poor in scalability. This work employs partition strategy and introduces the concept of pessimism grain to rollback recovery, striking a balance between good scalability and acceptable overhead. For a partitioned system, a coarse-grained pessimistic message-logging protocol is proposed to achieve scalability and asynchrony both in fault-free execution and in fault recovery. The impact of pessimism grain on the performance is evaluated theoretically. Experimental results show that the pessimism grain is one of the key configuration parameters to reach a desired performance level.