  Fault-tolerance techniques for stream processing engines can be categorized
into passive and active approaches. A typical passive approach periodically
checkpoints a processing task's runtime states and can recover a failed task by
restoring its runtime state using its latest checkpoint. On the other hand, an
active approach usually employs backup nodes to run replicated tasks. Upon
failure, the active replica can take over the processing of the failed task
with minimal latency. However, both approaches have their own inadequacies in
Massively Parallel Stream Processing Engines (MPSPE). The passive approach
incurs a long recovery latency especially when a number of correlated nodes
fail simultaneously, while the active approach requires extra replication
resources. In this paper, we propose a new fault-tolerance framework, which is
Passive and Partially Active (PPA). In a PPA scheme, the passive approach is
applied to all tasks while only a selected set of tasks will be actively
replicated. The number of actively replicated tasks depends on the available
resources. If tasks without active replicas fail, tentative outputs will be
generated before the completion of the recovery process. We also propose
effective and efficient algorithms to optimize a partially active replication
plan to maximize the quality of tentative outputs. We implemented PPA on top of
Storm, an open-source MPSPE and conducted extensive experiments using both real
and synthetic datasets to verify the effectiveness of our approach.
