318699
Design and implementation of a consistent time service for fault-tolerant distributed systems
Clock-related operations are one of the many sources of replica non-determinism and of replica inconsistency in fault-tolerant distributed systems. In passive replication, if the primary server crashes, the next clock value returned by the new primary server might have actually rolled back in time, which can lead to undesirable consequences for the replicated application. The same problem can happen for active replication when the result of the first replica to respond is taken as the next clock value. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a Consistent Time Service for faulttolerant distributed systems. The Consistent Time Service introduces a group clock that is consistent across the replicas and that ensures the determinism of the replicas with respect to clock-related operations. The groupclock is monotonicallyincreasing, is transparent to the application, and is fault-tolerant. The Consistent Time Service guaranteesthe consistency of the groupclock evenwhen faults occur, when new replicas are added into the group, and when failed replicas recover.
8961835
Design and Implementation of a Pluggable Fault-Tolerant CORBA Infrastructure
In this paper we present the design and implementation of a Pluggable Fault-Tolerant CORBA Infrastructure that provides fault tolerance for CORBA applications by utilizing the pluggable protocols framework that most CORBA ORBs provide. Our approach does not require any modification to the CORBA ORB, and requires only minimal modification to the application. Moreover, it avoids the difficulty of retrieving and assigning the ORB state by embedding the fault tolerance mechanisms into the ORB. The Pluggable Fault-Tolerant CORBA Infrastructure exhibits similar or better performance than other Fault-Tolerant CORBA systems, while providing strong replica consistency.
9870709
End-to-end latency of a fault-tolerant CORBA infrastructure
This paper presents an evaluation of the end-to-end latency of a fault-tolerant CORBA infrastructure that we have implemented. The fault-tolerant infrastructure replicates the server applications using active, passive and semi-active replication, and maintains strong replica consistency of the server replicas. By analyses and by measurements of the running fault-tolerant infrastructure, we characterize the end-to-end latency under fault-free conditions. The main determining factor of the run-time performance of the fault-tolerant infrastructure is the Totem group communication protocol, which contributes to the end-to-end latency primarily in two ways: the delay in sending messages and the processing cost of the rotating token.To reduce the delay in sending messages for passive and semi-active replication, the position of the primary server replica on the Totem ring, the token rotation time, the processing time at the client, and the processing time at the server must be considered. For active replication, the presence of duplicate messages adversely affects the performance. However, if an effective sending-side duplicate suppression mechanism is implemented, active replication is more advantageous than both passive and semi-active replication because of the automatic selection of the most favorable position of the server replica that sends the first non-duplicate reply.
195350091
Design and implementation of a pluggable fault tolerant CORBA infrastructure
In this paper we present the design and implementation of a Pluggable Fault Tolerant CORBA Infrastructure that provides fault tolerance for CORBA applications by utilizing the pluggable protocols framework that is available for most CORBA ORBS. Our approach does not require modification to the CORBA ORB, and requires only minimal modifications to the application. Moreover; it avoids the difficulty of retrieving and assigning the ORB state, by incorporating the fault tolerance mechanisms into the ORB. The Pluggable Fault Tolerant CORBA Infrastructure achieves performance that is similar to, or better than, that of other Fault Tolerant CORBA systems, while providing strong replica consistency.
12760716
Making Web services dependable
Web services offer great promise for integrating and automating software applications within and between enterprises over the Internet. However, ensuring that Web services are dependable, and can satisfy their clients' requests when the clients need them is a real challenge because, typically, a business activity involves multiple Web services and a Web service involves multiple components, each of which must be dependable. In this paper, we describe fault tolerance techniques, including replication, checkpointing, and message logging, in addition to reliable messaging and transaction management for which Web services specifications exist. We discuss how those techniques can be applied to the components of the Web services involved in the business activities to render them dependable.
11584663
Deterministic scheduling for multithreaded replicas
Replication of objects, processes and components is essential for building reliable distributed systems. However, maintaining replica consistency in the presence of nondeterminism is a challenge. There are many sources of nondeterminism in the applications being replicated. In this paper, we focus on the nondeterminism resulting from multithreading in the applications, and present a deterministic scheduling algorithm for ensuring consistent execution of replicated multithreaded applications.
9772845
Performance Measurements for Privacy Preserving Data Mining
This paper establishes the foundation for the performance measurements of privacy preserving data mining techniques. The performance is measured in terms of the accuracy of data mining results and the privacy protection of sensitive data. On the accuracy side, we address the problem of previous measures and propose a new measure, named “effective sample size”, to solve this problem. We show that our new measure can be bounded without any knowledge of the data being mined, and discuss when the bound can be met. On the privacy protection side, we identify a tacit assumption made by previous measures and show that the assumption is unrealistic in many situations. To solve the problem, we introduce a game theoretic framework for the measurement of privacy.
1315595
An energy-efficient slack distribution technique for multimode distributed real-time embedded systems
In multimode distributed systems, active task sets are assigned to their distributed components for realizing one or more functions. Many of these systems encounter runtime task variations at the input and across the system while processing their tasks in real time. Very few efforts have been made to address energy efficient scheduling in these types of distributed systems. In this paper, we propose an analytical model for energy efficient scheduling in distributed real-time embedded systems to handle time-varying task inputs. A new slack distribution scheme is introduced and adopted during the schedule of the task sets in the system. The slack distribution is made according to the service demand at the nodes which affects the energy consumption in the system. The active component at a node periodically determines the service rate and applies voltage scaling according to the dynamic traffic condition observed at various network nodes. The proposed approach uses a comprehensive traffic description function at nodes and provides adequate information about the worst-case traffic behavior anywhere in the distributed network, thereby enhancing the system power management capabilities. We evaluate the proposed technique using several benchmarks employing an event driven simulator and demonstrate its performance for multimode applications. Experimental results indicate significant energy savings in various examples and case studies.
43377675
Approximating the Medial Axis from the Voronoi Diagram with a Convergence Guarantee
We show that the medial axis of a surface S ? R3 can be approximated as a subcomplex of the Voronoi diagram of a point sample of S. The subcomplex converges to the true medial axis as the sampling density approaches infinity. Moreover, the subcomplex can be computed in a scale and density independent manner. Experimental results as detailed in a companion paper corroborate our theoretical claims.
1017509
Admission control for hard real-time connections in ATM LANs
A CAC algorithm must efficiently determine if a new connection can be admitted by verifying that its QoS requirements can be met without violating those of previously admitted connections. In hard real-time systems, the QoS requirements are specified in terms of end-to-end cell deadlines and no cell loss due to buffer overflow. A CAC algorithm must account for interdependencies among connections caused by statistical multiplexing of cells in ATM networks. Arbitrarity of network topology may lead to cyclic dependencies among various connections. We present an efficient CAC algorithm that addresses the above issues. The algorithm uses a traffic descriptor called the maximum traffic rate function to effectively compute bounds on end-to-end delays of connections and buffer requirements within the network. Our work differs from most previous work in that it does not require traffic restoration inside the network.
2266795
Response time analysis for distributed real-time systems with bursty job arrivals
This paper presents a new schedulability analysis methodology for distributed hard real-time systems with bursty job arrivals. The schedulability is analyzed by comparing worst-case response times of jobs with their timing constraints. We compute response times with a new method, which uses the amount of received service time to determine the response time of instances of a job. We illustrate how this method can be applied to exactly determine worst-case response times for processors with preemptive static priority schedulers, and how it gives a good approximation on the response times for processors with non-preemptive static-priority scheduling or first-come-first-served scheduling. Our schedulability analysis method is the first to support systems with arbitrary job arrival patterns. Nevertheless, it performs better than other known approaches used for systems with periodic job arrivals.