Volunteer availability based fault tolerant scheduling mechanism in desktop grid computing environment

Fault tolerance is essential to the further development of desktop grid computing system in order to guarantee continuous and reliable execution of tasks in spite of failures. In a desktop grid computing environment, volunteers are often susceptible to volunteer autonomy failures such as volatility failure and interference failure in the middle of execution of tasks because a desktop grid computing maximally respects autonomy of volunteers. The failures result in an independent livelock problem (i.e. the delay and blocking of the entire execution of a job). Therefore, the failures should be considered in a scheduling mechanism. In this paper in order to tolerate volunteer autonomy failures, we propose a new fault tolerant scheduling mechanism. First, we specify a volunteer autonomy failures and an independent livelock problem. Then, we propose a volunteer availability which reflects the degree of volunteer autonomy failures. Finally, we propose a fault tolerant scheduling mechanism based on volunteer availability (which is called VAFTSM).