Amdahl's Reliability Law: A Simple Quantification of the Weakest-Link Phenomenon

Amdahl's performance law is a useful conceptual and pedagogical tool for imparting key ideas about performance limits and the importance of balanced system design to students and practitioners in the field. The weakest-link maxim of reliability engineering can be expressed in terms of an identical formula, giving it a quantitative basis and thus making it more convincing. Calling it 'Amdahl's reliability law' stresses the fact that it follows directly from Amdahl's speedup formula

Stochastic automata and the problems of reliability in sequential machines

The reliability of sequential machines is an important factor in their design and implementation. In this thesis, stochastic sequential machine models are employed to investigate some of the problems concerning the reliability of sequential machines. Two different methods are used to find the reliability required of individual elements. The first method is based on a property of stochastic matrices with a principal entry in every row, and the second one uses the notion of entropy for stochastic automata. These two approaches are then compared and the first one is found to be advantageous. A survey of the literature on stochastic automata and a method for increasing the reliability of sequential machines by simple redundancy at the element level are also included

Interconnection Networks with Hypercubic Skeletons

The hypercubic family of interconnection networks, encompassing the hypercube and its derivatives and variants, has a wide range of applications in parallel processing. Various problems in general complex networks can be addressed by choosing a hypercubic network as a skeleton. In this paper, we provide insight into why hypercubic networks are suitable as network skeletons and discuss a mapping scheme to take advantage of the symmetry of such networks for developing efficient algorithms