Fault tolerance has been an active research area for many years. This volume presents papers from a workshop held in 1993 where a small number of key researchers and practitioners in the area met to discuss the experiences of industrial practitioners, to provide a perspective on the state of the art of fault tolerance research, to determine whether the subject is becoming mature, and to learn from the experiences so far in order to identify what might be important research topics for the coming years. The workshop provided a more intimate environment for discussions and presentations than usual at conferences. The papers in the volume were presented at the workshop, then updated and revised to reflect what was learned at the workshop.

This book presents the proceedings of the First European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC-1), held in Berlin, Germany, in October 1994. EDCC is the merger of two former European events on dependable computing. The volume comprises 34 refereed full papers selected from 106 submissions. The contributions address all current aspects of dependable computing and reflect the state of the art in dependable systems research and advanced applications; among the topics covered are hardware and software reliability, safety-critical and secure systems, fault-tolerance and detection, verification and validation, formal methods, hardware and software testing, and parallel and distributed systems.

Software fault tolerance techniques involve error detection, exception handling, monitoring mechanisms, and error recovery. This issue of Trends in Software focuses on identification, formulation, application, and evaluation of current software fault tolerance techniques.

This book presents the theory behind software-implemented hardware fault tolerance, as well as the practical aspects needed to put it to work on real examples. By evaluating accurately the advantages and disadvantages of the already available approaches, the book provides a guide to developers willing to adopt software-implemented hardware fault tolerance in their applications. Moreover, the book identifies open issues for researchers willing to improve the already available techniques.