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Cascading failure
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A cascading failure is a failure in a system of interconnected parts in which the failure of a part can trigger the failure of successive parts.
Cascading failure in power transmission
Cascading failure is common in power grids when one of the elements fails (completely or partially) and shifts its load to nearby elements in the system. Those nearby elements are then pushed beyond their capacity so they become overloaded and shift their load onto other elements.
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Encyclopedia
A cascading failure is a failure in a system of interconnected parts in which the failure of a part can trigger the failure of successive parts.
Cascading failure in power transmission
Cascading failure is common in power grids when one of the elements fails (completely or partially) and shifts its load to nearby elements in the system. Those nearby elements are then pushed beyond their capacity so they become overloaded and shift their load onto other elements. Cascading failure is a common effect seen in high voltage systems, where a single point of failure (SPF) on a fully loaded or slightly overloaded system results in a sudden spike across all nodes of the system. This surge current can induce the already overloaded nodes into failure, setting off more overloads and thereby taking down the entire system in a very short time.
This failure process cascades through the elements of the system like a ripple on a pond and continues until substantially all of the elements in the system are compromised and/or the system becomes functionally disconnected from the source of its load. For example, under certain conditions a large power grid can collapse after the failure of a single transformer.
Monitoring the operation of a system, in real-time, and judicious disconnection of parts can help stop a cascade. Another common technique is to calculate a safety margin for the system by computer simulation of possible failures, to establish safe operating levels below which none of the calculated scenarios is predicted to cause cascading failure, and to identify the parts of the network which are most likely to cause cascading failures.
Examples
Cascading failure in computer networks
Cascading failures can also occur in computer networks (such as the Internet) in which network traffic is severely impaired or halted to or between larger sections of the network, caused by failing or disconnected hardware or software. In this context, the cascading failure is known by the term cascade failure. A cascade failure can affect large groups of people and systems.
The cause of a cascade failure is usually the overloading of a single, crucial router or node, which causes the node to go down, even briefly. It can also be caused by taking a node down for maintenance or upgrades. In either case, traffic is routed to or through another (alternative) path. This alternative path, as a result, becomes overloaded, causing it to go down, and so on. It will also affect systems which depend on the node for regular operation.
Symptoms
The symptoms of a cascade failure are easy to see: packet loss and high network latency, not just to single systems, but to whole sections of a network or the internet. The high latency and packet loss is caused by the nodes that fail to operate due to congestion collapse, which causes them to still be present in the network but without much or any useful communication going through them. As a result, routes can still be considered valid, without them actually providing communication.
If enough routes go down because of a cascade failure, a complete section of the network or internet can become unreachable. Although undesired, this can help speed up the recovery from this failure as connections will time out, and other nodes will give up trying to establish connections to the section(s) that have become cut off, decreasing load on the involved nodes.
A common thing to see during a cascade failure is a walking failure, where sections go down, causing the next section to fail, after which the first section comes back up. This ripple can make several passes through the same sections or connecting nodes before stability is restored.
History
Cascade failures are a relatively recent development, with the massive increase in traffic and the high interconnectivity between systems and networks. The term was first applied in this context in the late 1990s by a Dutch IT professional and has slowly become a relatively common term for this kind of large-scale failure.
Example
The animation shown here illustrates an example of a connecting node between a local ISP and their Internet backbone being overloaded.
Initially, the traffic that would normally go through the node is stopped. Systems and users get errors about not being able to reach hosts. Usually, the redundant systems of an ISP respond very quickly, choosing another path through a different backbone. The routing path through this alternative route is longer, with more hops and subsequently going through more systems that normally do not process the amount of traffic suddenly offered.
This can cause one or more systems along the alternative route to go down, creating similar problems of their own.
Also, related systems are affected in this case. As an example, DNS resolution might fail and what would normally cause systems to be interconnected, might break connections that are not even directly involved in the actual systems that went down. This, in turn, may cause seemingly unrelated nodes to develop problems, that can cause another cascade failure all on its own.
Other examples of cascading failure
Analogues to this exist in biology of cascade-like effects where a small reaction can have system-wide implications. One example to this is the release of toxins caused by a small ischaemic attack, which kill off far more cells than the initial damage, resulting in more toxins being released. Current research is to find a way to block this cascade in stroke patients to minimize the damage.
Another example is the Cockcroft-Walton generator, which can also experience cascade failures wherein one failed diode can result in all the diodes failing in a fraction of a second.
Yet another example of this effect in a scientific experiment was the implosion in 2001 of several thousand fragile glass photomultiplier tubes used in the Super-Kamiokande experiment, where the shock wave caused by the failure of a single detector appears to have triggered the implosion of the other detectors in a chain reaction.
See also
External links
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- (Monash University's Virtual Lab)
- A. E. Motter and Y.-C. Lai, Physical Review E (Rapid Communications) 66, 065102 (2002).
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- Ian Dobson, Benjamin A. Carreras, and David E. Newman, A loading-dependent model of probabilistic cascading failure, Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, vol. 19, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 15-32.
- on September 2, 1998. Swissair Flight 111 flying from New York to Geneva slammed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia with 229 people aboard. Originally believed a terrorist act. After $39 million investigation, insurance settlement of $1.5 billion and more than four years, investigators unravel the puzzle: cascading failure. What is the legacy of Swissair 111? "We have a window into the internal structure of design, checks and balances, protection, and safety." -David Evans, Editor-in-Chief of Air Safety Week.
- PhysicsWeb story:
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