Energy-Efficient Redundant Execution of Processes in a Fault-Tolerant Cluster of Servers

This paper investigates into fault tolerance of cluster of servers and their energy efficiency to realize a reliable and energy aware server cluster system. A client issues a request to one server in a server cluster and the server sends a reply to the client in information systems. Once the server stops by fault, the client does not receive a reply of the request. Even if the request is performed on another server on detection of fault of the server, some QoS requirements like response time may not be satisfied. Hence, each request has to be redundantly performed on multiple servers to be tolerant of server faults. The redundant power consumption laxity-based (RPCLB) algorithm is discussed where multiple servers are selected to redundantly and energy-efficiently perform a request process in our previous studies. Since each application process is redundantly performed on more than one server, the larger amount of electric power is consumed. In this paper, we propose a novel and improved RPCLB (IRPCLB) algorithm to reduce the power consumption of servers, where once a process successfully terminates on one server, meaningless redundant processes are forced to terminate on the other servers. In the evaluation, we show the total power consumption of servers and total execution time of processes are reduced in homogeneous and heterogeneous types of clusters by the IRPCLB algorithm than the RPCLB and RR algorithms.