Using modulo rulers for optimal recovery schemes in distributed computing

Abstract

Clusters and distributed systems offer fault tolerance and high performance through load sharing. When all computers are up and running, we would like the load to be evenly distributed among the computers. When one or more computers break down the load on these computers must be redistributed to other computers in the cluster. The redistribution is determined by the recovery scheme. The recovery scheme should keep the load as evenly distributed as possible even when the most unfavorable combinations of computers break down, i.e. we want to optimize the worst-case behavior. We define recovery schemes, which are optimal for a larger number of computers down than in previous results. We also show that the problem of finding optimal recovery schemes for a cluster with n computers corresponds to the mathematical problem of finding the longest sequence of positive integers for which the sum of the sequence and the sums of all subsequences modulo n are unique.