Lightweight fault detection for shared virtual memory clusters

Shared virtual memory (SVM) is a practical approach for providing a simple parallel programming environment on a cluster of computers since it permits programmers to assume the existence of a shared memory image across physically distributed memory systems, obviating the need of explicit message passing operations. While several fault-tolerant techniques for crash recovery support in SVM have been proposed and studied extensively, very little attention has been given to fault detection issues. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a new fault detection technique, called lightweight fault detection (LFD). Our experimental results confirmed that LFD provides a swift fault detection support to SVM and incurs very little overhead (1.42% on average) during a failure-free execution. Hence, a combination of LFD with previously proposed crash recovery techniques make cluster computing on SVM more reliable and attractive.