Survey of fault tolerant techniques for grid

Besides the dynamic nature of grids, which means that resources may enter and leave the grid at any time, in many cases outside of the applications’ control, grid resources are also heterogeneous in nature. Many grid applications will be running in environments where interaction faults are more likely to occur between disparate grid nodes. As resources may also be used outside of organizational boundaries, it becomes increasingly difficult to guarantee that a resource being used is not malicious. Due to the diverse faults and failure conditions, developing, deploying, and executing long running applications over the grid remains a challenge. So fault tolerance is an essential factor for grid computing. This paper presents an extensive survey of different fault tolerant techniques such as replication strategies, check-pointing mechanisms, scheduling policies, failure detection mechanisms and finally malleability and migration support for divide-and-conquer applications. These techniques are used according to the needs of the computational grid and the type of environment, resources, virtual organizations and job profile it is supposed to work with. Each has its own merits and demerits which forms the subject matter of this survey.