Fault injection based on a partial view of the global state of a distributed system

Validating distributed systems is particularly difficult, since failures may occur due to a correlated occurrence of faults in different parts of the system. This paper describes the basis for and preliminary implementation of a new fault injector, called Loki, developed specifically for distributed systems. Loki addresses issues related to injecting correlated faults in distributed systems. In Loki, fault injection is performed based on a partial view of the global state of an application. In particular, facilities are provided to pass user-specified state information between nodes to provide a partial view of the global state in order to try to inject complex faults successfully. A post-runtime analysis, done using an off-line clock synchronization and a bounding technique, is used to place events and injections on a single global timeline and determine whether the intended faults were properly injected. Finally, observations containing successful fault injections are used to estimate specified dependability measures. In addition to describing the details of our new approach, we present experimental results obtained from a preliminary implementation in order to illustrate Loki's ability to inject complex faults predictably.