The future of fault tolerant computing

Fault tolerant (or dependable) computing has always been an exciting research area in the intersection of computer science and engineering and electrical and electronics engineering. During the last two decades the applicability of the methods and tools that the fault tolerance research community produces has expanded to virtually all application domains. The type of fault tolerance methods employed in a computing system depend on: (a) the faults expected to affect the system, (b) the importance of errors in the system operation, (c) the design, cost and power budgets that can allocated to fault tolerance and reliable operation. New solutions and tools in fault tolerant computing are emerging to deal with the very broad spectrum of values that all (a), (b) and (c) can take in today's computing landscape.