The Fault Tolerant Parallel Algorithm: the Parallel Recomputing Based Failure Recovery

This paper addresses the issue of fault tolerance in parallel computing, and proposes a new method named parallel recomputing. Such method achieves fault recovery automatically by using surviving processes to recompute the workload of failed processes in parallel. The paper firstly defines the fault tolerant parallel algorithm (FTPA) as the parallel algorithm which tolerates failures by parallel recomputing. Furthermore, the paper proposes the inter-process definition-use relationship analysis method based on the conventional definition-use analysis for revealing the relationship of variables in different processes. Under the guidance of this new method, principles of fault tolerant parallel algorithm design are given. At last, the authors present the design of FTPAs for matrix-matrix multiplication and NPB kernels, and evaluate them by experiments on a cluster system. The experimental results show that the overhead of FTPA is less than the overhead of checkpointing.