Failure recovery for process relationships in a single system image

Abstract

A system for recovery of process relationships following node failure within a computer cluster is provided. For relationship recovery, each node maintains set of care relationships. Each relationship is of the form carer cares about care target. Care relationships describe process relations such as parent-child or group leader-group member. Care relationships are stored at the origin node of their care targets. Following node failure, a surrogate origin node is selected. The surviving nodes then cooperate to rebuild vproc structures and care relationships for the processes that originated at the failed node at the surrogate origin node. The surviving nodes then determine which of their own care targets were terminated by the node failure. For each terminated care targets, notifications are sent to the appropriate carers. This allows surviving processes to correctly recover from severed process relationships.