Fault-Tolerant Systems

There are many applications in which the reliability of the overall system must be far higher than the reliability of its individual components. In such cases, designers devise mechanisms and architectures that allow the system to either completely mask the effects of a component failure or recover from it so quickly that the application is not seriously affected. This is the work of fault-tolerant designers and their work is increasingly important and complex not only because of the increasing number of "mission critical" applications, but also because the diminishing reliability of hardware means that even systems for non-critical applications will need to be designed with fault-tolerance in mind.

Reflecting the real-world challenges faced by designers of these systems, this book addresses fault tolerance design with a systems approach to both hardware and software. No other text on the market takes this approach, nor offers the comprehensive and up-to-date treatment Koren and Krishna provide. Students, designers and architects of high performance processors will value this comprehensive overview of the field.

• The first book on fault tolerance design with a systems approach
• Comprehensive coverage of both hardware and software fault tolerance, as well as information and time redundancy
• Incorporated case studies highlight six different computer systems with fault-tolerance techniques implemented in their design

About the Authors

Israel Koren is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Previously, he held positions with the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, the Technion at Haifa, Israel, and the University of California at Berkeley. He received a BSc (1967), an MSc (1970), and a DSc (1975) in electrical engineering from the Technion in Haifa, Israel. His research interests include fault-tolerant systems, VLSI yield and reliability, secure cryptographic systems, and computer arithmetic. He publishes extensively and has over 200 publications in refereed journals and conferences. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, the VLSI Design Journal, and the IEEE Computer Architecture Letters. He served as General Chair, Program Chair and Program Committee member for numerous conferences. He is the author of the textbook Computer Arithmetic Algorithms, 2nd edition, A.K. Peters, Ltd., 2002, and an editor and co-author of Defect and Fault-Tolerance in VLSI Systems, Plenum, 1989. Dr. Koren is a fellow of the IEEE Computer Society.

C. Mani Krishna is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1984. He previously received a BTech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, in 1979, and an MS from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, in 1980. Since 1984, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has carried out research in a number of areas: real-time, fault-tolerant, and distributed systems, sensor networks, and performance evaluation of computer systems. He coauthored a book, Real-Time Systems, McGraw-Hill, 1997, with Kang G. Shin. He has also been an editor on volumes of readings in performance evaluation and real-time systems, and for special issues on real-time systems of IEEE Computer and the Proceedings of the IEEE.