Electronic digital computers--Reliability

With the increase in the applications of computer technology, there are more and more demands for the use of computer systems in the area of real-time applications and critical systems. Reliability and performance are fundamental design requirements for these applications. In this dissertation, we develop some specific aspects of a fault-tolerant decentralized system architecture. This system can execute concurrent processes and it is composed of processing elements that have only local memories with point-to-point communication. A model using hierarchical layers describes this system. Fault tolerance techniques are discussed for the applications, software, operating system, and hardware layers of the model. Scheduling of communicating tasks to increase performance is also addressed. Some special problems such as the Byzantine Generals problem are considered. We have shown that, by combining reliable techniques on different layers and with consideration of system performance, one can provide a system with a very high level reliability as well as performance.

In the last few years, it has become profound to achieve higher performance of computers by solely upgrading logic technology. This required a move to a parallel processing system or a multiprocessor system in order to build faster computer systems. The importance of multiprocessor systems is increasing due to many reasons, one of which is reliability. In a multiprocessor system, a number of tasks may concurrently exist. To operate the system efficiently, one must carefully schedule the tasks. This thesis proposes a set of algorithms to schedule these tasks exploiting the inherent redundancy of processors in a multiprocessor system. Also discussed are some reliability issues and application to different networks with some examples.