The most important use of computing in the future will be in the context of the global "digital convergence" where everything becomes digital and every thing is inter-networked. The application will be dominated by storage, search, retrieval, analysis, exchange and updating of information in a wide variety of forms. Heavy demands will be placed on systems by many simultaneous re quests. And, fundamentally, all this shall be delivered at much higher levels of dependability, integrity and security. Increasingly, large parallel computing systems and networks are providing unique challenges to industry and academia in dependable computing, espe cially because of the higher failure rates intrinsic to these systems. The chal lenge in the last part of this decade is to build a systems that is both inexpensive and highly available. A machine cluster built of commodity hardware parts, with each node run ning an OS instance and a set of applications extended to be fault resilient can satisfy the new stringent high-availability requirements. The focus of this book is to present recent techniques and methods for im plementing fault-tolerant parallel and distributed computing systems. Section I, Fault-Tolerant Protocols, considers basic techniques for achieving fault-tolerance in communication protocols for distributed systems, including synchronous and asynchronous group communication, static total causal order ing protocols, and fail-aware datagram service that supports communications by time.

Understanding distributed computing is not an easy task. This is due to the many facets of uncertainty one has to cope with and master in order to produce correct distributed software. Considering the uncertainty created by asynchrony and process crash failures in the context of message-passing systems, the book focuses on the main abstractions that one has to understand and master in order to be able to produce software with guaranteed properties. These fundamental abstractions are communication abstractions that allow the processes to communicate consistently (namely the register abstraction and the reliable broadcast abstraction), and the consensus agreement abstractions that allows them to cooperate despite failures. As they give a precise meaning to the words "communicate" and "agree" despite asynchrony and failures, these abstractions allow distributed programs to be designed with properties that can be stated and proved. Impossibility results are associated with these abstractions. Hence, in order to circumvent these impossibilities, the book relies on the failure detector approach, and, consequently, that approach to fault-tolerance is central to the book. Table of Contents: List of Figures / The Atomic Register Abstraction / Implementing an Atomic Register in a Crash-Prone Asynchronous System / The Uniform Reliable Broadcast Abstraction / Uniform Reliable Broadcast Abstraction Despite Unreliable Channels / The Consensus Abstraction / Consensus Algorithms for Asynchronous Systems Enriched with Various Failure Detectors / Constructing Failure Detectors

A wide range of modern computer applications require the performance and flexibility of parallel and distributed systems. Better software support is required if the technical advances in these systems are to be fully exploited by commerce and industry. This involves the provision of specialised techniques and tools as well as the integration of standard software engineering methods. This book will reflect current advances in this area, and will address issues of theory and practice with contributions from academia and industry. It is the aim of the book to provide a focus for information on this developing which will be of use to both researchers and practitioners.

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Parallel Computing on Distributed Memory Multiprocessors, held at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, July 1-13, 1991

Fault-Tolerant Systems, Second Edition, is the first book on fault tolerance design utilizing a systems approach to both hardware and software. No other text takes this approach or offers the comprehensive and up-to-date treatment that Koren and Krishna provide. The book comprehensively covers the design of fault-tolerant hardware and software, use of fault-tolerance techniques to improve manufacturing yields, and design and analysis of networks. Incorporating case studies that highlight more than ten different computer systems with fault-tolerance techniques implemented in their design, the book includes critical material on methods to protect against threats to encryption subsystems used for security purposes. The text's updated content will help students and practitioners in electrical and computer engineering and computer science learn how to design reliable computing systems, and how to analyze fault-tolerant computing systems. - Delivers the first book on fault tolerance design with a systems approach - Offers comprehensive coverage of both hardware and software fault tolerance, as well as information and time redundancy - Features fully updated content plus new chapters on failure mechanisms and fault-tolerance in cyber-physical systems - Provides a complete ancillary package, including an on-line solutions manual for instructors and PowerPoint slides

Covering both the theoretical and practical aspects of fault-tolerant mobile systems, and fault tolerance and analysis, this book tackles the current issues of reliability-based optimization of computer networks, fault-tolerant mobile systems, and fault tolerance and reliability of high speed and hierarchical networks.The book is divided into six parts to facilitate coverage of the material by course instructors and computer systems professionals. The sequence of chapters in each part ensures the gradual coverage of issues from the basics to the most recent developments. A useful set of references, including electronic sources, is listed at the end of each chapter./a