Tolerating failures in the bag-of-tasks programming paradigm

A simple technique for making distributed programs that are based on the bag-of-tasks programming paradigm, in which the problem space is divided up and parceled out to processes as independent subtasks, fault tolerant is presented. The technique is based on adding a conditional swap operator to Linda, a system for programming distributed applications whose most notable feature is an associative memory called tuple space. The way in which this new operator is used to achieve fault-tolerance in programs is described and illustrated by a simple program for DNA sequencing. Extensions for dynamic subtask creation are described. A straightforward way to implement the atomic swap operator within an existing fault-tolerant version of Linda is also presented.<>