Hardware And Software Architectures For Fault Tolerance

Hardware and Software Architectures for Fault Tolerance

Fault tolerance has been an active research area for many years. This volume presents papers from a workshop held in 1993 where a small number of key researchers and practitioners in the area met to discuss the experiences of industrial practitioners, to provide a perspective on the state of the art of fault tolerance research, to determine whether the subject is becoming mature, and to learn from the experiences so far in order to identify what might be important research topics for the coming years. The workshop provided a more intimate environment for discussions and presentations than usual at conferences. The papers in the volume were presented at the workshop, then updated and revised to reflect what was learned at the workshop.

Hardware and Software Architectures for Fault Tolerance

Software-Implemented Hardware Fault Tolerance

Software-Implemented Hardware Fault Tolerance addresses the innovative topic of software-implemented hardware fault tolerance (SIHFT), i.e., how to deal with faults affecting the hardware by only (or mainly) acting on the software. The first SIHFT techniques were proposed and adopted several decades ago, but they have been the object of new interest in the past few years, mainly due to the need for developing low-cost safety-critical computer-based applications in fields such as automotive, biomedics, and telecommunications. Therefore, several new approaches to detect, and when possible correct, transient and permanent faults in the hardware have been recently proposed. These approaches are innovative (with respect to those proposed in the past) since they are of higher applicability (often starting from the source-level code of an application) and generality, being capable of coping with many different fault types. The book presents the theory behind software-implemented hardware fault tolerance, as well as the practical aspects related to put it at work on real examples. By evaluating accurately the advantages and disadvantages of the already available approaches, the book provides a guide to developers willing to adopt software-implemented hardware fault tolerance in their applications. Moreover, the book identifies open issues for researchers willing to improve the already available techniques.