ultrareliable multicomputer architecture for real time control applications

This thesis considers the design of ultrareliable multicomputers for control applications. The fault tolerance problem is divided into three subproblems: software, processing node, and communication fault tolerance. Design is performed using layers of abstraction, with fault tolerance implemented by dedicated layers. For software fault tolerance, new constructs for concurrent n-version programming are introduced. For processing node fault tolerance, the distributed fault tolerance (DFT) concept of Chen and Chen is extended to allow for arbitrary failures. Communication fault tolerance is achieved with multicasting on a fault-tolerant graph (FG) network. Reliability models are developed for each of the layers, and a performance model is developed for the communication layer. An example flight control system is compared to currently existing architectures.