Distributed fault tolerant controllers

Abstract

Distributed applications are often built from sets of distributed components that must be co-ordinated in order to achieve some global behaviour. The common approach is to use a centralised controller for co-ordination, or occasionally a set of distributed entities. Centralised co-ordination is simpler but introduces a single point of failure and poses problems of scalability. Distributed co-ordination offers greater scalability, reliability and applicability but is harder to reason about and requires more complex algorithms for synchronisation and consensus among components. In this paper we present a system called GOANNA that from a state machine specification (FSM) of the global behaviour of interacting components can automatically generate a correct, scalable and fault tolerant distributed implementation. GOANNA can be used as a backend for different tools as well as an implementation platform in its own right.