Fault tolerance and MPI

[Carl_Notfors at vdgc.com.sg]

Our computational model is quite simple.  We have a master node and a
number of slave nodes.  All communication is between the master and the
slaves, ie. no internode communication, so all communication is done with
MPI_Send and MPI_Recv (we are using LAM/MPI).

The problem with MPI is that there is no fault tolerance, if a slave node
"dies" the whole process goes down.  According to the LAM documentation it
should be possible to achieve some fault tolerance but we have as yet not
tried this.

Is there anyone who has got this working?  Is there fault tolerance in any
othe MPI implementations?  Would it be better to use PVM if you want fault
tolerance?


Carl