A Failure Detection System for Large Scale Distributed Systems

Failure detection is a fundamental building block for ensuring fault tolerance in large scale distributed systems. In this paper we present an innovative solution to this problem. The approach is based on adaptive, decentralized failure detectors, capable of working asynchronous and independent on the application flow. The proposed failure detectors are based on clustering, the use of a gossip-based algorithm for detection at local level and the use of a hierarchical structure among clusters of detectors along which traffic is channeled. In this we present result proving that the system is able to scale to a large number of nodes, while still considering the QoS requirements of both applications and resources, and it includes the fault tolerance and system orchestration mechanisms, added in order to assess the reliability and availability of distributed systems in an autonomic manner.