E-raamat: Foundations of Dependable Computing: System Implementation

The third volume of a three-volume compendium of papers summarizing research into computer dependability after the revelation that the task really belongs to software rather than hardware. Completes the picture established in Models and Frameworks for Dependable Systems and Paradigms for Dependable Applications by detailing techniques for implementing a dependability infrastructure for the system: the operating system, run-time environment, communications, and processor levels. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Foundations of Dependable Computing: System Implementation, explores the system infrastructure needed to support the various paradigms of Paradigms for Dependable Applications. Approaches to implementing support mechanisms and to incorporating additional appropriate levels of fault detection and fault tolerance at the processor, network, and operating system level are presented. A primary concern at these levels is balancing cost and performance against coverage and overall dependability. As these chapters demonstrate, low overhead, practical solutions are attainable and not necessarily incompatible with performance considerations. The section on innovative compiler support, in particular, demonstrates how the benefits of application specificity may be obtained while reducing hardware cost and run-time overhead.
A companion to this volume (published by Kluwer) subtitled Models and Frameworks for Dependable Systems presents two comprehensive frameworks for reasoning about system dependability, thereby establishing a context for understanding the roles played by specific approaches presented in this book's two companion volumes. It then explores the range of models and analysis methods necessary to design, validate and analyze dependable systems.
Another companion to this book (published by Kluwer), subtitled Paradigms for Dependable Applications, presents a variety of specific approaches to achieving dependability at the application level. Driven by the higher level fault models of Models and Frameworks for Dependable Systems, and built on the lower level abstractions implemented in a third companion book subtitled System Implementation, these approaches demonstrate how dependability may be tuned to the requirements of an application, the fault environment, and the characteristics of the target platform. Three classes of paradigms are considered: protocol-based paradigms for distributed applications, algorithm-based paradigms for parallel applications, and approaches to exploiting application semantics in embedded real-time control systems.