Completely asynchronous optimistic recovery with minimal rollbacks

Abstract

Consider the problem of transparently recovering an asynchronous distributed computation when one or more processes fail. Basing rollback recovery on optimistic message logging and replay is desirable for several reasons, including not requiring synchronization between processes during failure-free operation. However previous optimistic rollback recovery protocols either have required synchronization during recovery, or have permitted a failure at one process to potentially trigger an exponential number of process rollbacks. We present an optimistic rollback recovery protocol that provides completely asynchronous recovery, while also reducing the number of times a process must roll back in response to a failure to at most one. This protocol is based on comparing timestamp vectors across multiple levels of partial order time.<>