10,620 research outputs found
Fault-tolerant software for the FIMP
The work reported here provides protection against software failures in the task dispatcher of the FTMP, a particularly critical portion of the system software. Faults in other system modules and application programs can be handled by similar techniques but are not covered in this effort. Goals of the work reported here are: (1) to develop provisions in the software design that will detect and mitigate software failures in the dispatcher portion of the FTMP Executive and, (2) to propose the implementation of specific software reliability measures in other parts of the system. Beyond the specific support to the FTMP project, the work reported here represents a considerable advance in the practical application of the recovery block methodology for fault tolerant software design
Integrated analysis of error detection and recovery
An integrated modeling and analysis of error detection and recovery is presented. When fault latency and/or error latency exist, the system may suffer from multiple faults or error propagations which seriously deteriorate the fault-tolerant capability. Several detection models that enable analysis of the effect of detection mechanisms on the subsequent error handling operations and the overall system reliability were developed. Following detection of the faulty unit and reconfiguration of the system, the contaminated processes or tasks have to be recovered. The strategies of error recovery employed depend on the detection mechanisms and the available redundancy. Several recovery methods including the rollback recovery are considered. The recovery overhead is evaluated as an index of the capabilities of the detection and reconfiguration mechanisms
Requirements and preliminary design for a general purpose real-time executive for flight computers
The requirements and preliminary design of a general purpose, real-time executive computers program for flight computers are provided. A description and the requirements are included for the major elements of the executive: an initialization model, a task scheduler, and an interrupt handler. Task priorities and various process interrupts are discussed. System parameters and variables are identified which make the design adaptable to various flight computer and applicaton specifications
File Fragmentation over an Unreliable Channel
It has been recently discovered that heavy-tailed
file completion time can result from protocol interaction even
when file sizes are light-tailed. A key to this phenomenon is
the RESTART feature where if a file transfer is interrupted
before it is completed, the transfer needs to restart from the
beginning. In this paper, we show that independent or bounded
fragmentation guarantees light-tailed file completion time as long
as the file size is light-tailed, i.e., in this case, heavy-tailed file
completion time can only originate from heavy-tailed file sizes.
If the file size is heavy-tailed, then the file completion time is
necessarily heavy-tailed. For this case, we show that when the
file size distribution is regularly varying, then under independent
or bounded fragmentation, the completion time tail distribution
function is asymptotically upper bounded by that of the original
file size stretched by a constant factor. We then prove that if the
failure distribution has non-decreasing failure rate, the expected
completion time is minimized by dividing the file into equal sized
fragments; this optimal fragment size is unique but depends on
the file size. We also present a simple blind fragmentation policy
where the fragment sizes are constant and independent of the
file size and prove that it is asymptotically optimal. Finally, we
bound the error in expected completion time due to error in
modeling of the failure process
Advanced software techniques for space shuttle data management systems Final report
Airborne/spaceborn computer design and techniques for space shuttle data management system
Development and evaluation of a Fault-Tolerant Multiprocessor (FTMP) computer. Volume 2: FTMP software
The software developed for the Fault-Tolerant Multiprocessor (FTMP) is described. The FTMP executive is a timer-interrupt driven dispatcher that schedules iterative tasks which run at 3.125, 12.5, and 25 Hz. Major tasks which run under the executive include system configuration control, flight control, and display. The flight control task includes autopilot and autoland functions for a jet transport aircraft. System Displays include status displays of all hardware elements (processors, memories, I/O ports, buses), failure log displays showing transient and hard faults, and an autopilot display. All software is in a higher order language (AED, an ALGOL derivative). The executive is a fully distributed general purpose executive which automatically balances the load among available processor triads. Provisions for graceful performance degradation under processing overload are an integral part of the scheduling algorithms
- …