Using Ant’s Brood Sorting to Increase Fault Tolerance in Linda’s Tuple Distribution Mechanism

Abstract

Coordination systems have been used in a variety of different applications but have never performed well in large scale, faulty settings. The sheer scale and level of complexity of today’s applications is enough to make the current ways of thinking about distributed systems (e.g. deterministic decisions about data organization) obsolete. All the same, computer scientists are searching for new approaches and are paying more attention to stochastic approaches that provide good solutions “most of the time”. The trade-off here is that by loosening certain requirements the system ends up performing better in other fronts such as adaptiveness to failures. Adaptation is a key component to fault-tolerance and tuple distribution is the center of the fault-tolerance problem in tuple-space systems. Hence, this paper shows how the tuple distribution in Linda-like systems can be solved by using an adaptive self-organized approach à la Swarm Intelligence. The results discussed in this paper demonstrate that efficient and adaptive solutions to this problem can be achieved using simple and inexpensive approaches.