In Praise of Fault-Tolerant Systems
"Fault attacks have recently become a serious concern in the smart card
industry. "Fault-Tolerant Systems" provides the reader with a clear
exposition of these attacks and the protection strategies that can be
used to thwart them. A must read for practitioners and researchers
working in the field."
David Naccache
Ecole normale superieure
"Understanding the fundamentals of an area, whether it is golf or fault
tolerance, is a prerequisite to developing expertise in the area.
Krishna and Koren's book can provide a reader with this underlying
foundation for fault tolerance. This book is particularly timely because
the design of fault-tolerant computing components, such as processors
and disks, is becoming increasingly important to the mainstream
computing industry."
Shubu Mukherjee, Director
FACT-AMI Group, Intel Corporation
"Professors Koren and Krishna, have written a modern, dual purpose text
that first presents the basics fault tolerance tools describing various
redundancy types both at the hardware and software levels followed by
current research topics. It reviews fundamental reliability modeling
approaches, combinatorial blocks and Markov chain techniques. Notably,
there is a complete chapter on statistical simulation
methods that offers guidance to practical evaluations as well as one on
fault-tolerant networks. All chapters, which are clearly written
including illuminating examples, have extensive reference lists whereby
students can delve deeper into almost any topic. Several practical and
commercial computing systems that incorporate fault tolerance are
detailed. Furthermore, there are two chapters introducing
current fault tolerance research challenges, cryptographic systems
and defects in VLSI designs."
Robert Redinbo
UC Davis
"The field of Fault-Tolerant Computing has advanced considerably in the
past ten years and yet no effort has been made to put together these
advances in the form of a book or a comprehensive paper for the
students starting in this area. This is the first book I know of in the
past 10 years that deals with hardware and software
aspects of fault tolerant computing, is very comprehensive, and is
written as a text for the course."
Kewal Saluja
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Fault-Tolerant Systems - Foreword
Systems used in critical applications such as health, commerce,
transportation, utilities, and national security must be highly
reliable. Ubiquitous use of computing systems and other electronic
systems in these critical areas requires that computing systems have
high reliability. High reliability is achieved by designing
the systems to be fault-tolerant. Even though the high reliability
requirements of computing systems gave the original impetus to the
study of the design of fault tolerant systems, trends in manufacturing
of VLSI circuits and systems are also requiring the use of
fault-tolerant design methods to achieve high yields from manufacturing
plants. This is due to the fact that with reduced feature sizes of
VLSI circuit designs and shortcomings of lithographic techniques used
in fabrication the characteristics of the manufactured devices are
becoming unpredictable. Additionally small sizes of devices make them
susceptible to radiation induced failures causing run time errors.
Thus it may be necessary to use fault tolerance techniques even in
systems that are used in non-critical applications such as consumer
electronics.
This book covers comprehensively the design of fault-tolerant hardware
and software, use of fault-tolerance techniques to improve manufacturing
yields and design and analysis of networks. Additionally it includes
material on methods to protect against threats to encryption subsystems
used for security purposes. The material in the book will help
immensely students and practitioners in electrical and computer
engineering and computer science in learning how to design reliable
computing systems and how to analyze fault-tolerant computing systems.
Sudhakar M. Reddy
Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Iowa Foundation
Iowa City, Iowa