Patent ID: 8225129

Claim:
A method for on-line selection of back-up sites to provide failure recovery in cooperative data stream processing, the method comprising: identifying a plurality of separate, autonomous and independent distributed sites, each site comprising one or more nodes and capable of independently hosting on the nodes applications associated with jobs derived from inquiries to process continuous dynamic streams of data; and using an inter-site back-up mechanism to provide failure recovery for applications running on one or more primary sites selected from the identified plurality of distributed sites, using the inter-site back-up mechanism comprising negotiating among the identified plurality of autonomous distributed sites to identify in advance of a failure and to assign a set of back-up sites selected from the identified plurality of distributed sites to each application running on the primary sites such that costs associated with communications between a given primary site and the back-up sites assigned to the applications running on that primary site are reduced while meeting reliability requirements associated with the applications running on that primary site; wherein each application to which a plurality of back-up sites is assigned is instantiated only on a given primary site before occurrence of an event requiring failure recovery and is instantiated on only one of the pre-assigned back-up sites only after occurrence of an event requiring failure recovery.