Course

Syllabus

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.

Text Books / References

1. Israel Koren and C. Mani Krishna, “Fault Tolerant Systems”, Elsevier, 2^nd edition, 2020.  
2. K. Pradhan, “Fault-Tolerant Computing, Theory and Techniques”, Prentice-Hall, 1998 
3. 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.

Pre-requisite: Nil

Course Objectives:

• To introduce the goals, applications, and fault models pertaining to computing systems.
• To provide knowledge on hardware, software, and time redundancy techniques for designing fault-tolerant systems.
• To familiarize reliability evaluation methods and real-world case studies of fault-tolerant systems across critical domains.

Course Outcomes:

CO-PO Mapping: