Title
Failure Recovery in Resilient X10
Abstract
Cloud computing has made the resources needed to execute large-scale in-memory distributed computations widely available. Specialized programming models, e.g., MapReduce, have emerged to offer transparent fault tolerance and fault recovery for specific computational patterns, but they sacrifice generality. In contrast, the Resilient X10 programming language adds failure containment and failure awareness to a general purpose, distributed programming language. A Resilient X10 application spans over a number of places. Its formal semantics precisely specify how it continues executing after a place failure. Thanks to failure awareness, the X10 programmer can in principle build redundancy into an application to recover from failures. In practice, however, correctness is elusive, as redundancy and recovery are often complex programming tasks. This article further develops Resilient X10 to shift the focus from failure awareness to failure recovery, from both a theoretical and a practical standpoint. We rigorously define the distinction between recoverable and catastrophic failures. We revisit the happens-before invariance principle and its implementation. We shift most of the burden of redundancy and recovery from the programmer to the runtime system and standard library. We make it easy to protect critical data from failure using resilient stores and harness elasticity—dynamic place creation—to persist not just the data but also its spatial distribution. We demonstrate the flexibility and practical usefulness of Resilient X10 by building several representative high-performance in-memory parallel application kernels and frameworks. These codes are 10× to 25× larger than previous Resilient X10 benchmarks. For each application kernel, the average runtime overhead of resiliency is less than 7%. By comparing application kernels written in the Resilient X10 and Spark programming models, we demonstrate that Resilient X10’s more general programming model can enable significantly better application performance for resilient in-memory distributed computations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3332372
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Keywords
Field
DocType
APGAS, X10
Spark (mathematics),Programmer,Programming language,Programming paradigm,Computer science,Correctness,Fault tolerance,Redundancy (engineering),Cloud computing,Distributed computing,Runtime system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
41
3
0164-0925
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.37
0
Authors
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
David Grove11883138.77
Sara S. Hamouda210.37
Benjamin Herta31098.06
Arun Iyengar41815203.64
Kawachiya, K.514516.81
Josh Milthorpe621.06
Vijay A. Saraswat72446178.27
Avraham Shinnar830721.77
Mikio Takeuchi924921.32
Olivier Tardieu10161.53