Fault-tolerant parallel applications using queues and actions

Abstract

There are many techniques supporting execution of large computations over a network of workstations (NOW) but data intensive computations are usually run on high performance parallel machines. A NOW comprising individual user's machines typically has a low performance interconnect and suffers arbitrary changes of availability. Exploiting such resources to execute data intensive computations is difficult but even in a more constrained environment there is an unfulfilled need for fault-tolerance. The structuring approach presented fulfills this need. Performance exceeding 100 Mflop/s is demonstrated for large fault-tolerant out of core examples of matrix multiplication and Cholesky factorisation using five 133 MHz Pentium compute machines.