Fault-tolerance support in distributed systems
Richard D. Schlichting · 1990
The general goal of our research program for a number of years has been to devise abstractions, mechanisms, and formal methods that facilitate the construction of fault-tolerant programs, especially those designed for execution on distributed systems.Most recently, we we have been pursuing on a collection of related projects a variety of areas, ranging from communication protocols to formal verification.In particular, we have been investigating the following specific topics:• Operating system support for fault-tolerant, distributed programming.• Programming language abstractions that facilitate construction of fault-tolerant, distributed systems.• Verification of fault-tolerant programs.Much of this research is directly applicable to the topic of the workshop, especially the issues of formal methods, appropriate programming paradigms, and packaging of fault-tolerance primitives.In the sections that follow, we briefly outline the nature of our investigations in these three areas.Relevant papers are cited following the description.