HP Labs Technical Reports

Somersault : Enabling Fault-Tolerant Distributed Software Systems

Murray, Paul, T.; Fleming, Roger A.; Harry, Paul D.; Vickers, Paul A.

HPL-98-81

Keyword(s): fault-tolerant; CORBA; process replication; process mirroring; high availability

Abstract: Somersault is a platform for developing distributed fault-tolerant software components and integrating these critical components with other components into distributed system solutions. Critical application processes are mirrored across a network, with each critical process being replicated in a primary and secondary. Replication of processes and recovery from the failure of a replica are handled transparently. Somersault provides a fault-tolerant communication transport protocol, which can be plugged into an Object Request Broker, a combination which achieves replication transparency. Somersault has been developed at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, and runs on standard operating systems such as Unix and NT. Somersault has been through two iterations of algorithm design, implementation and optimisation in order to achieve high message throughput and fast recovery from failure. At the time of writing it is undergoing industrial trials and detailed performance testing.

18 Pages

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