Nested Dynamic Actions - How to Solve the Fault Containment Problem in a Cooperative Action.pdfVIP

Nested Dynamic Actions - How to Solve the Fault Containment Problem in a Cooperative Action Model Edgar Nett and Beatrice Weiler German National Research Center for Computer Science (GMD) Schlo? Birlinghoven, 53754 St. Augustin, Germany, e-mail : (nett, weiler)@gmd.de Abstract Elements of transaction processing become more and more accepted as a base for fault-tolerant distributed computing. We have developed an action concept with an extended functionality suited to better support the needs of Concurrent Engineering applications. This allows actions to access data produced by other, still active actions. In case of an action fault, however, fault containment may become a problem of major concern. Nesting seems to be an appropriate means to tackle this problem. Unfortunately, it is not possible to simply adopt the nested transactional concept as designed by Moss, because it does not consider dependencies between actions belonging to different parents. This paper is to present a nesting concept which provides an adequate means for fault containment in dynamic actions. Special emphasis is given to the problem of protecting the work of a parent action against the consequences of the abort of other actions. 1. Introduction Elements of transaction processing become more and more accepted as a base for fault-tolerant distributed computing. Our work in that area concentrates in providing a toolset for a flexible action management that will meet the requirements of future applications 1 . The rigid combination of the ACID-properties known from database transactions 1 this work is partially supported by the Commission of the European Community under ESPRIT contract 8148 [1] is to restrictive for more general purpose applications. In particular, database transactions are an inappropriate abstraction to model highly cooperative applications. A valid result of a conventional database transaction is always achieved by a single u