Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Group Talk: RSRG

Button Crash Fault Detection in Celerating Environments

Scott Pike
Department of Computer Science
Texas A&M University

Sep 10 2009 3:30 pm
480 Dreese Labs
All interested parties are welcome.
Refreshments will be served prior to the talk.

Abstract:

Failure detectors are a service that provides (approximate) information about process crashes in a distributed system. The well-known "eventually perfect" failure detector, <>P, has been implemented in partially synchronous systems with unknown upper bounds on message delay and relative process speeds. However, previous implementations have overlooked an important subtlety with respect to measuring the passage of time in "celerating" environments, in which absolute process speeds can continually increase or decrease while maintaining bounds on relative process speeds.

Existing implementations either use action clocks (which fail in accelerating environments) or use real-time clocks (which fail in decelerating environments). We propose the use of bichronal clocks, which are a composition of action clocks and real-time clocks. Our solution can be readily adopted to make existing implementations of <>P robust to process celeration, which can result from hardware upgrades, server overloads, denial-of-service attacks, and other system volatilities.

Bio:
Scott Pike completed his Ph.D. in 2004 at Ohio State in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He is currently a research assistant professor for the State of Texas at Texas A&M University. His research on fault isolation explores self-healing distributed systems along two basic axes: (1) Spatial containment of permanent faults via fault detection oracles, (2) Temporal containment of transient faults via self-stabilization.

Host: Paolo Sivilotti

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