A Programming Language Approach to Fault Tolerance for Fork-Join Parallelism

Abstract

When running big parallel computations on thousands of processors, the probability that an individual processor will fail during the execution cannot be ignored. Computations should be replicated, or else failures should be detected at runtime and failed subcomputations reexecuted. We follow the latter approach and propose a high-level operational semantics that detects computation failures, and allows failed computations to be restarted from the point of failure. We implement this high-level semantics with a lower-level operational semantics that provides a more accurate account of processor failures, and prove in Coq the correspondence between the high- and low-level semantics.