Provenance-based fault tolerance technique recommendation for cloud-based scientific workflows: a practical approach

Abstract

Scientific workflows are abstractions composed of activities, data and dependencies that model a computer simulation and are managed by complex engines named scientific workflow management system (SWfMS). Many workflows demand many computational resources once their executions may involve a number of different programs processing a massive volume of data. Thus, the use of high-performance computing (HPC) and data-intensive scalable computing environments allied to parallelization techniques provides the necessary support for the execution of such workflows. Clouds are environments that already offer HPC capabilities and workflows can explore them. Although clouds offer advantages such as elasticity and availability, failures are a reality rather than a possibility in this environment. Thus, existing SWfMS must be fault-tolerant. There are several types of fault tolerance techniques used in SWfMS such as Checkpoint/Restart, Re-Execution and Over-provisioning, but it is far from trivial to choose the suitable fault tolerance technique for a workflow execution that is not going to jeopardize the parallel execution. The major problem is that the suitable fault tolerance technique may be different for each workflow, activity or activation since programs associated with activities may present different behaviors. This article aims at analyzing several fault-tolerance techniques in a cloud-based SWfMS named SciCumulus, and recommend the suitable one for user’s workflow activities and activations using machine learning techniques and provenance data, thus aiming at improving resiliency.