Novel Approaches for Distributing Workload on Commodity Computer Systems

摘要

Efficient management of a distributed system is a common problem for university's and commercial computer centres, and handling node failures is a major aspect of it. Failures which are rare in a small commodity cluster, at large scale become common, and there should be a way to overcome them without restarting all parallel processes of an application. The efficiency of existing methods can be improved by forming a hierarchy of distributed processes. That way only lower levels of the hierarchy need to be restarted in case of a leaf node failure, and only root node needs special treatment. Process hierarchy changes in real time and the workload is dynamically rebalanced across online nodes. This approach makes it possible to implement efficient partial restart of a parallel application, and transactional behaviour for computer centre service tasks.