Design and validation of portable communication infrastructure for fault-tolerant cluster middleware

Abstract

We describe the communication infrastructure (CI) for our fault-tolerant cluster middleware, which is optimized for two classes of communication: for the applications and for the cluster management middleware. This CI was designed for portability and for efficient operation on top of modern user-level message passing mechanisms. We present a functional fault model for the CI and show how platform-specific faults map to this fault model. Based on this fault model, we have developed a fault injection scheme that is integrated with the CI and is thus portable across different communication technologies. We have used fault injection to validate and evaluate the implementation of the CI itself as well as the cluster management middleware in the presence of communication faults.