IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems

Chordal rings have been proposed in the past as networks that combine the simple routing framework of rings with the lower diameter, wider bisection, and higher resilience of other architectures. Virtually all proposed chordal ring networks are node-symmetric, i.e., all nodes have the same in/out degree and interconnection pattern. Unfortunately, such regular chordal rings are not scalable. In thi... View full abstract»

This paper evaluates the concurrent error detection capabilities of system-level checks, using fault and error injection. The checks comprise application and system level mechanisms to detect control flow errors. We propose Enhanced Control-Flow Checking Using Assertions (ECCA). In ECCA, branch-free intervals (BFI) in a given high or intermediate level program are identified and the entry and exit... View full abstract»

Communication services that provide enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees related to dependability and real time are important for many applications in distributed systems. This paper presents real-time dependable (RTD) channels, a communication-oriented abstraction that can be configured to meet the QoS requirements of a variety of distributed applications. This customization ability is ba... View full abstract»

This paper presents Chameleon, an adaptive infrastructure, which allows different levels of availability requirements to be simultaneously supported in a networked environment. Chameleon provides dependability through the use of special ARMORs-Adaptive. Reconfigurable, and Mobile Objects for Reliability-that control all operations in the Chameleon environment. Three broad classes of ARMORs are def... View full abstract»

This paper presents a real-time primary-backup replication scheme to support fault-tolerant data access in a real-time environment. The main features of the system are fast response to client requests, bounded inconsistency between primary and backup, temporal consistency guarantee for replicated data, and quick recovery from failures. The paper defines external and interobject temporal consistenc... View full abstract»

We propose a formal definition for the timed asynchronous distributed system model. We present extensive measurements of actual message and process scheduling delays and hardware clock drifts. These measurements confirm that this model adequately describes current distributed systems such as a network of workstations. We also give an explanation of why practically needed services, such as consensu... View full abstract»

Effective detection of failures is essential for reliable communication services. Traditionally, non-real-time computer networks have relied on behavior-based techniques for detecting communication failures. That is, each node uses heartbeats to detect the failure of its neighbors and the end-to-end transport protocol (e.g., TCP) achieves reliable communication by acknowledgment/retransmission. Re... View full abstract»

The development and validation of fault-tolerant computers for critical real-time applications are currently both costly and time consuming. Often, the underlying technology is out-of-date by the time the computers are ready for deployment. Obsolescence can become a chronic problem when the systems in which they are embedded have lifetimes of several decades. This paper gives an overview of the wo... View full abstract»

Tasks in a real-time control application are usually periodic and they have deadline constraints by which each instance of a task is expected to complete its computation, even in the adverse circumstances caused by component failures. Techniques to recover from processor failures often involve a reconfiguration in which all tasks are assigned to fault-free processors. This reconfiguration may resu... View full abstract»