Efficient algorithms for optimistic crash recovery

Summary Recovery from transient processor failures can be achieved by using optimistic message logging and checkpointing. The faulty processorsroll back, and some/all of the non-faulty processors also may have to roll back. This paper formulates the rollback problem as a closure problem. A centralized closure algorithm is presented together with two efficient distributed implementations. Several related problems are also considered and distributed algorithms are presented for solving them. S. Venkatesan received the B. Tech. and M. Tech degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1981 and 1983, respectively and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1985 and 1988. He joined the University of Texas at Dallas in January 1989, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. His research interests are in fault-tolerant distributed systems, distributed algorithms, testing and debugging distributed programs, fault-tolerant telecommunication networks, and mobile computing. Tony Tony-Ying Juang is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Chung-Hwa Polytechnic Institute. He received the B.S. degree in Naval Architecture from the National Taiwan University in 1983 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas in 1989 and 1992, respectively. His research interests include distributed algorithms, fault-tolerant distributed computing, distributed operating systems and computer communications.This research was supported in part by NSF under Grant No. CCR-9110177 and by the Texas Advanced Technology Program under Grant No. 9741-036