Course

Goals and Applications of Fault Tolerant Computing – Reliability, Availability, Safety, Dependability, Long Life, Critical Computation, High Availability Applications, Fault Tolerance as a Design Objective. Fault Models – Faults, Errors, and Failures, Causes and Characteristics of Faults, Logical and Physical Faults, Error Models.    

Fault Tolerant Design Techniques: Hardware redundancy, Software Redundancy, Time redundancy and Information redundancy. Check pointing, Fault tolerant networks, Reconfiguration-based fault tolerance. 

Reliability Evaluation Techniques – Failure Rate, Mean Time to Repair, Mean Time Between Failure, Reliability Modelling, Fault Coverage, M-of-N Systems, Markov Models, Safety, Maintainability, Availability. Case studies of fault tolerant systems and current research issues – Space Shuttle, Tandem 16 Non-Stop System, Recovery oriented computing, Fault tolerant platforms for Automotive Safety-Critical, Reliability and Fault tolerance in Collective Robot Systems.

Suggested Lab Sessions:

·         Overview of MATLAB / Equivalent for implementation of models for reliability, availability, safety, dependability, etc.

·         Implementation of error models and failure analysis models

·         Implement fault tolerant design for a relevant application

Course Outcomes:

CO1: Understand basics of fault tolerance and fault models. 

CO2: Discuss various forms of redundancies and fault tolerant design techniques.

CO3: Develop concepts on system reliability. 

CO4: Comprehend different fault tolerant design concepts.

Textbooks / References:

1.      Israel Koren and C. Mani Krishna, “Fault Tolerant Systems”, Elsevier, 2^nd edition, 2020. 

2.      D. K. Pradhan, “Fault-Tolerant Computing, Theory and Techniques”, Prentice-Hall, 1998

3.      M. L. Shooman, “Reliability of Computer Systems and Networks Fault Tolerance Analysis and Design,” Wiley, 2003

4.      Elena Dubrova, “Fault-Tolerant Design,” Springer-Verlag New York, 2013.  

5.      Barry W. Johnson, “Design and Analysis of Fault-Tolerant Digital System”, Addison, 2009.