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Fault-tolerant and efficient parallel computation. Doctoral thesis

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:7169968
Recent advances in computer technology made parallel machines a reality. Massively parallel systems use many general-purpose, inexpensive processing elements to attain computation speed-ups comparable to or better than those achieved by expensive, specialized machines with a small number of fast processors. In such setting, however, one would expect to see an increased number of processor failures attributable to hardware or software. This may eliminate the potential advantage of parallel computation. We believe that this presents a reliability bottleneck that is among fundamental problems in parallel computation. We investigate algorithmic ways of introducing fault-tolerance in multiprocessors under the constraint of preserving efficiency. This research demonstrates how in certain models of parallel computation it is possible to combine efficiency and fault-tolerance. We show that in the models we study, it is possible to develop efficient parallel algorithms without concern for fault-tolerance, and then correctly and efficiently execute these algorithms on parallel machines whose processors are subject to arbitrary dynamic failstop errors. By ensuring efficient executions for any patterns of failures, the efficiency is also maintained when failures are infrequent, or when the expected number of failures is small.
Research Organization:
Brown Univ., Providence, RI (United States). Dept. of Computer Science
OSTI ID:
7169968
Report Number(s):
AD-A-253350/3/XAB; CS--92-23; CNN: N00014-91-J-1613
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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