Synergistic coordination between software and hardware fault tolerance techniques

Describes an approach for enabling the synergistic coordination between two fault-tolerance protocols to simultaneously tolerate software and hardware faults in a distributed computing environment. Specifically, our approach is based on a message-driven confidence-driven (MDCD) protocol that we have devised for tolerating software design faults, and a time-based (TB) checkpointing protocol that was developed by N. Neves and W.K. Fuchs (1996) for tolerating hardware faults. By carrying out algorithm modifications that are conducive to synergistic coordination between volatile-storage and stable-storage checkpoint establishments, we are able to circumvent the potential interference between the MDCD and TB protocols, and to allow them to effectively complement each other to extend a system´s fault tolerance capability. Moreover, the protocol coordination approach preserves and enhances the features and advantages of the individual protocols that participate in the coordination, keeping the performance cost low.