Supporting fault-tolerance for time-critical events in distributed environments

In this paper, we consider the problem of supporting fault tolerance for adaptive and time-critical applications in heterogeneous and unreliable grid computing environments. Our goal for this class of applications is to optimize a user-specified benefit function while meeting the time deadline. Our first contribution in this paper is a multi-objective optimization algorithm for scheduling the application onto the most efficient and reliable resources. In this way, the processing can achieve the maximum benefit while also maximizing the success-rate, which is the probability of finishing execution without failures. However, for the cases where failures do occur, we have developed a hybrid failure-recovery scheme to ensure that the application can complete within the pre-specified time interval. Our experimental results show that our scheduling algorithm can achieve better benefit when compared to several heuristics-based greedy scheduling algorithms, while still having a negligible overhead. Benefit is further improved when we apply the hybrid failure recovery scheme, and the success-rate becomes 100%.