Work

Fail-slow fault tolerance needs programming support

Year: 2021

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: The need for fail-slow fault tolerance in modern distributed systems is highlighted by the increasingly reported fail-slow hardware/software components that lead to poor performance system-wide. We argue that fail-slow fault tolerance not only needs new distributed protocol designs, but also desires programming support for implementing and verifying fail-slow fault-tolerant code. Our observation is that the inability of tolerating fail-slow faults in existing distributed systems is often rooted in the implementations and is difficult to understand and debug. We designed the Dependably Fast Library (DepFast) for implementing fail-slow tolerant distributed systems. DepFast provides expressive interfaces for taking control of possible fail-slow points in the program to prevent unexpected slowness propagation once and for all. We use DepFast to implement a distributed replicated state machine (RSM) and show that it can tolerate various types of fail-slow faults that affect existing RSM implementations.

Source: Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems

DOI: 10.1145/3458336.3465299

Authors: Andrew Yoo, Yuanli Wang, Ritesh Sinha, Shuai Mu, Tianyin Xu

Institutions: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois System, University of Minnesota, Stony Brook University

Language: English

Topic: Distributed systems and fault tolerance

Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: National Science Foundation

Awards: CNS Core: Medium: Rethinking Architecture and Operating Systems for Modern Virtualization Technologies, SHF: Small: Science and Tools for Intelligent Developer Testing, PPoSS: Planning: Inflight Analytics to Control Large-Scale Heterogeneous Systems