This course deals with designing and analyzing reliable digital systems. Various aspects of reliability in digital systems including fault tolerance, fault detection, diagnosis, and reconfiguration will be examined. The topics covered include faults and their manifestations, fault avoidance techniques, hardware redundancy, error detecting and correcting codes, time redundancy, software redundancy, reliability and availability analysis, Markov reliability modeling, system evaluation and performance reliability tradeoffs, real-time fault tolerance, and examples of practical systems.

Fault-Tolerant Computer System Design, D. Pradhan, Prentice-Hall, 1996.

NOTE: You need to order this book from www.amazon.com as soon as possible.

Some papers from the literature will be distributed during the term.

References:

1. Design and Analysis of Fault-Tolerant Digital Systems, B. W. Johnson: Addison-Wesley, 1989.
2. Reliable Computer Systems-Design and Evaluation, 2nd edition, D. Siewiorek and R. Swarz: Digital Press - Butterworth, 1992.
3. Fault Tolerance in Distributed Systems, P. Jalote: Prentice Hall, 1994
4. Performance and Reliability Analysis of Computer Systems, R. Sahner, K. Trivedi: Kluwer Academic, 1996
5. Fault Tolerance through reconfiguration of VLSI and WSI arrays, R. Negrini: MIT Press, 1989.

Grading Policy:

Special dates:

Presentations by students - possible topics:

• Using spare processor capacity for FT
• Reconfiguration and Embedding in Multiprocessor systems
• Fault-tolerant communication and/or routing
• Roll-back and forward recovery schemes
• Clock synchronization algorithms
• Group communication
• Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)
• Fault injection
• Formal verification methods and tools
• Fault-tolerant real-time systems