Vanessa Forney
Michael Norris
Paul Fallon
Chris Hunt

CSC 550: Grad OS

The results of the project are documented in Meerkat.pdf.

Power loss presents a problem for systems, even when uninterruptible power supplies are in place. Frequently, these battery backups fail without warning, and a user can face data loss if his or her remote server dies. However, due to capacitance in normal power supplies, the server can still operate for a short time after power is cut. In this paper we analyze the compute time provided by various capacitance values. We also present the Meerkat protocol, which takes advantage of the time between loss of power and loss of computation ability on a dying machine to notify the “buddy” Meerkat.