Increasing the cluster availability using RADIC

The redundant array of distributed independent checkpoints (RADIC) is a fault tolerant architecture based on a fully distributed array of dedicated process. These processes collaborate to create a fault tolerance controller which transparently manages all fault tolerance activities. The architecture is designed as a software layer between the application and the cluster structure and it was developed to attend to the requirements of scalability, user transparency and independency of dedicated/stable cluster resources. RADIC only requires the resources already available in the nodes used by the parallel application and it uses a pessimistic message-log rollback-recovery protocol in order to operate without any global synchronization. Such protocol, together with the independence of central elements, makes RADIC a scalable architecture that works transparently to the user. We tested the functionality and performance of the architecture in a real scenario using a prototype based on the MPI standard (RADICMPI)