A Model for Space-Correlated Failures in Large-Scale Distributed Systems
Matthieu Gallet, Nezih Yigitbasi, Bahman Javadi, Derrick Kondo, Alexandru Iosup, Epema, DHJ Dick · 2010
Abstract. Distributed systems such as grids, peer-to-peer systems, and even Internet DNS servers have grown significantly in size and complexity in the last decade. This rapid growth has allowed distributed systems to serve a large and increasing number of users, but has also made resource and system failures inevitable. Moreover, perhaps as a result of system complexity, in distributed systems a single failure can trigger within a short time span several more failures, forming a group of time-correlated failures. To eliminate or alleviate the significant effects of failures on per-formance and functionality, the techniques for dealing with failures re-quire good failure models. However, not many such models are available, and the available models are valid for few or even a single distributed sys-tem. In contrast, in this work we propose a model that considers groups of time-correlated failures and is valid for many types of distributed sys-tems. Our model includes three components, the group size, the group inter-arrival time, and the resource downtime caused by the group. To validate this model, we use failure traces corresponding to fifteen dis-tributed systems. We find that space-correlated failures are dominant in terms of resource downtime in seven of the fifteen studied systems. For each of these seven systems, we provide a set of model parameters that can be used in research studies or for tuning distributed systems. Last, as a result of our work six of the studied traces have been made available through the Failure Trace Archive