Rapid Prototyping Of Parallel Fault Tolerant Systems
Mark S. Nixon, C.I. Birkinshaw, Peter Croll, Derek G. Marriott · 2005
The design of a fault tolerant system would be enhanced if a rapid prototyping approach could be conceived which allows fault tolerance to be modelled quickly, and faults simulated to analyse the behaviour of the system. This paper concentrates on how a functional specification language, and its environment, can be used to describe and investigate the properties of parallel fault tolerant systems. The functional system used is grounded in the theory of parallel processing and functional programming. Keywords: Fault tolerance, functional specification, parallel processing, timing analysis. 1 Introduction The introduction of computers within safety critical applications is an area of increasing concern [1, 2, 3]. Fault tolerance has been proposed as a method of increasing the reliability of such systems [4] but the design of fault tolerant systems is not easy [5, 6]. The synchronous message passing approach to parallel processing offers both the performance required by modern control s...