Practical Fault-Tolerant Framework for eScience Infrastructure

Many areas of science currently use computing resources as a important part of their research, and many research groups adopt cluster architecture to use them efficiently and manage them easily. Therefore, faulttolerance becomes a very important property for the computing resources. However, fault-tolerant systems have not yet been widely adopted because they are either hard to deploy, hard to use, hard to manage, hard to maintain, or hard to justify. This paper proposes a practical fault-tolerant system for eScience infrastructures. Our system uses checkpoint/ restart mechanism for fault-tolerance, and provides a easy mechanism to integrate with Grid services widely used in eScience. Additionally, we run rigorous tests using scientific applications to verify that our system can be used in clusters. We also describe improvements made to our system to solve various problems that arose when deploying it on a cluster. The experimental results show that not only does our system conform to various types of running environment well, but that it can also be practically deployed in clusters.