Dependability enhancement for coalition clusters with autonomic failure management

In large-scale compute clusters, failures become norms instead of exceptions. Autonomic management of failures and resources in such systems is becoming more and more important. In this paper, we propose a failure management mechanism with prediction functionality for large coalition systems. It analyzes failure behaviors in a system and forecasts the prospective failure occurrences based on characterized failure dynamics. A prototype of our failure management system is implemented and deployed in a coalition cluster environment. Prediction results in the experiments show our proposed mechanism can accurately capture the failure trend in the coalition cluster.