HOPE

This paper presents a new approach to fault-tolerant language systems without a single point of failure for irregular parallel applications. Work-stealing frameworks provide good load balancing for many parallel applications, including irregular ones written in a divide-and-conquer style. However, work-stealing frameworks with fault-tolerant features such as checkpointing do not always work well. This paper proposes a completely opposite "work omission" paradigm and its more detailed concept as a "hierarchical omission"-based parallel execution model called HOPE. HOPE programmers' task is to specify which regions in imperative code can be executed in sequential but arbitrary order and how their partial results can be accessed. HOPE workers spawn no tasks/threads at all; rather, every worker has the entire work of the program with its own planned execution order, and then the workers and the underlying message mediation systems automatically exchange partial results to omit hierarchical subcomputations. Even with fault tolerance, the HOPE framework provides parallel speedups for many parallel applications, including irregular ones.