Performance of message logging protocols for NOWs with MPI

Abstract

Among the various systems developed for parallel and distributed computing, networks of workstations (NOWs) based on the Message Passing Interface (MPI) have been recognized as an efficient platform. In this paper, we implement and compare two important message logging protocols, pessimistic and optimistic, for a NOW employing MPI. An experiment reveals that the total execution time is not significantly affected by the number of failures, while the performance of the optimistic protocol is more influenced by the number of failures than the pessimistic protocol is. Also, the former is more efficient than the latter for a reasonable number of failure points.