COMPUTING SCIENCE Architecting Holistic Fault Tolerance

The optimality and maintainability of fault tolerance mechanisms in a computer system has typically not been a major topic of concern, mostly because fault tolerance is a non-functional system requirement. This paper proposes a Holistic Fault Tolerance architecture, based on a centralised fault tolerance management, with related functionality distributed across the entire system. The most suitable error detection and error recovery strategies for a given application are chosen by a special crosscutting controller depending on error rates, system performance and resource utilisation requirements. We discuss the motivation for introducing this holistic fault tolerance architecture and reason about its benefits from the point of view of optimal system operation and improved maintainability. The advantages and possible implementation challenges of the proposed approach are demonstrated by a real-world application. © 2016 Newcastle University. Printed and published by Newcastle University, Computing Science, Claremont Tower, Claremont Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, England. Bibliographical Details Rem Gensh, Ashur Rafiev, Alexander Romanovsky CSR Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Alessandro Garcia Informatics Department PUC-Rio Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Fei Xia, Alex Yakovlev School of EEE Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY Computing Science. Technical Report Series. CS-TR-1505