Optimistic recovery in a distributed processing system

摘要

In a distributed system whose state space is partitioned into recovery units, wherein recovery units communicate by the exchange of messages and wherein a message received by a recovery unit may causally depend on other recovery units having received prior messages, a method of recovering from failure of any number of recovery units in the system comprising the steps of: (a) tracking the dependency of each message received by a recovery unit in terms of the causative messages received by other recovery units in the system; and (b) restoring all recovery units to a consistent system-wide state after recovery unit failure by means of the tracked message dependencies.