Active/active replication for highly available HPC system services

Today's high performance computing systems have several reliability deficiencies resulting in availability and serviceability issues. Head and service nodes represent a single point of failure and control for an entire system as they render it inaccessible and unmanageable in case of a failure until repair, causing a significant downtime. This paper introduces two distinct replication methods (internal and external) for providing symmetric active/active high availability for multiple head and service nodes running in virtual synchrony. It presents a comparison of both methods in terms of expected correctness, ease-of-use and performance based on early results from ongoing work in providing symmetric active/active high availability for two HPC system services (TORQUE and PVFS metadata server). It continues with a short description of a distributed mutual exclusion algorithm and a brief statement regarding the handling of Byzantine failures. This paper concludes with an overview of past and ongoing work, and a short summary of the presented research.

当今的高性能计算系统具有几种可靠性缺陷，导致可用性和可维修性问题。头和服务节点代表了整个系统的单个故障和控制点，因为它们使其无法访问并且在维修之前无法控制，并且无法控制，从而导致大量停机时间。本文介绍了两种不同的复制方法（内部和外部），用于为在虚拟同步中运行的多个头部和服务节点提供对称的活动/主动高可用性。它根据正在进行的两种HPC系统服务（Torque和PVFS Metadata Server）提供的对称主动/主动高可用性的早期结果来对两种方法进行比较。它继续对分布式相互排除算法的简短描述以及有关处理拜占庭失败的简短陈述。本文以过去和正在进行的工作的概述以及介绍的研究简要介绍。