AQuA: an adaptive architecture that provides dependable distributed objects

Building dependable distributed systems from commercial off-the-shelf components is of growing practical importance. For both cost and production reasons, there is interest in approaches and architectures that facilitate building such systems. The AQuA architecture is one such approach; its goal is...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on computers 2003-01, Vol.52 (1), p.31-50
Main Authors: Yansong Ren, Bakken, D.E., Courtney, T., Cukier, M., Karr, D.A., Rubel, P., Sabnis, C., Sanders, W.H., Schantz, R.E., Seri, M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Architecture
Buildings
Computer crashes
CORBA (computers)
Costs
Fault detection
Fault tolerance
Faults
Group communication
Measurement
Messages
Production systems
Programming profession
Replication
Resource management
Runtime
Studies
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Building dependable distributed systems from commercial off-the-shelf components is of growing practical importance. For both cost and production reasons, there is interest in approaches and architectures that facilitate building such systems. The AQuA architecture is one such approach; its goal is to provide adaptive fault tolerance to CORBA applications by replicating objects. The AQuA architecture allows application programmers to request desired levels of dependability during applications' runtimes. It provides fault tolerance mechanisms to ensure that a CORBA client can always obtain reliable services, even if the CORBA server object that provides the desired services suffers from crash failures and value faults. AQuA includes a replicated dependability manager that provides dependability management by configuring the system in response to applications' requests and changes in system resources due to faults. It uses Maestro/Ensemble to provide group communication services. It contains a gateway to intercept standard CORBA IIOP messages to allow any standard CORBA application to use AQuA. It provides different types of replication schemes to forward messages reliably to the remote replicated objects. All of the replication schemes ensure strong, data consistency among replicas. This paper describes the AQuA architecture and presents, in detail, the active replication pass-first scheme. In addition, the interface to the dependability manager and the design of the dependability manager replication are also described. Finally, we describe performance measurements that were conducted for the active replication pass-first scheme, and we present results from our study of fault detection, recovery, and blocking times.
ISSN:0018-9340
1557-9956
DOI:10.1109/TC.2003.1159752