Integrated and Modular Systems for Commercial ... - Nonstop Systems

Fault Tolerance
- the ability of a system to sustain one or more specified faults
in a way that is transparent to the operating environment -
• achieved by adding & managing redundancy: one or
more alternate means to perform a particular function
or flight operation
• goal: only independent, multiple faults and design
errors remain as reasonably possible causes of
catastrophic failure conditions
• fail-passive, fail-safe, fail-active are fail-intolerant
• “fault tolerant” does not imply “highly dependable”,
“fault free”, “ignorance tolerant”, or “full/fool proof”
ref.: J.H. Lala, R. Harper: “Architectural principles for safety-critical real-time applications”, Proc. of the IEEE, Vol. 82, No. 1, Jan. ‘94, pp. 25-40
ref.: D.P. Siewiorek, R.S. Swarz (eds.): “Reliable Computer Systems”, 2nd ed., Digital Press, ‘92, 908 pp., ISBN 1-55558-075-0
ref.: M.R. Lyu (ed.): “Software fault tolerance”, Wiley & Sons, ‘95, 337 pp., ISBN 0-471-95068-8
ref.: F.J. Redmill: “Dependability of critical computer systems - 1”, ITP Publ., ‘88, 292 pp., ISBN 1-85166-203-0
ref.: B.W. Johnson: “Design and Analysis of fault tolerant systems”, Addison-Wesley, ‘89, 584 pp., ISBN 0-201-07570-9
ref.: “25th Anniversary Compendium of Papers from Symposium on Fault Tolerant Computing”, IEEE Comp. Society Press, ‘96, 300 pp., ISBN 0-8186-7150-5
ref.: J.C. Laprie, J. Arlat, C. Beounes, K. Kanoun, C. Hourtolle: “Hardware- and software-fault tolerance: definition and analysis of architectural solutions”, Proc. 17th
Symp. on Fault Tolerant Computing, Pittsburg/PA, July ‘87, pp. 116-121