IAF0530 - Süsteemide usaldusväärsus ja veakindlus
Dependability and fault tolerance. Version 2011

Welcome to the cource IAF0530 - Dependability and Fault Tolerance homepage.

Here you will find all the information about the course, including reading materials, lecture notes, etc. Till then you can visit the 2010's version of the same course.

Lectures will be held on Mondays, 16:00-17:30. Location: IT-209 (Raja 15) Important dates:

• February 28: Case study topic selection, incl. preliminary list of literature (by e-mail)
• March 28: Draft of the report + introductory presentation of the topic (3-5 min.). Participation mandatory
• May 2 - May 16: Presentations (Register!)

• Final report: latest by May 27, 23:59 (Sharp!)
• Exam timetable and registration

Case Studies

• Case Studies. For MSc students: 20 min presentation + 6 pages of text. For PhD students: 30 min presentation + 10 pages of text.
• Template: DOC/PDF.
• Some examples of possible topics.
• Chosen topics.
• Registration for presentations.

Text-books:

• Reliability engineering: theory and practice, Alessandro Birolini, Springer, 2004, 2007, 2010
• Safety-critical Computer Systems, Neil Storey, Addison Wesley, 1996.
• Fault-Tolerant Systems, Israel Koren and C. Mani Krishna, Morgan-Kaufman Publishers, 2007

Lecture notes

• Lecture 1 (pdf) - Introduction, historical perspectiv, basic terminology
  
  Additional reading:
  • George Candea, "The Basics of Dependability"
  • William R. Dunn, "Designing Safety-Critical Computer Systems," IEEE Computer, Volume 36, Issue 11, Nov. 2003. Page(s):40 - 46.
  • Robert N. Charette, Why Software Fails, IEEE Spectrum
  • Bianca Schroeder and Garth A. Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University, Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?, 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2007.

• Lectures 2-3 (pdf) - Safety, Hazards, Risks.
  
  Additional reading:
  • Therac-25
  • Therac-25 investigations
  • IEC 61508 - Functional Safety.
    • To read: "Functional safety and IEC 61508" ning "FAQ - Part E: Key Concepts".
  • Methods of Determining Safety Integrity Level
  
  Get acquainted:
  • Incident Reporting and Analysis for Electrical, Electronic and Programmable Electronic Systems (E/E/PES) under IEC61508

• Lecture 4: (pdf) - Fault Tolerance, Software Testing.
  
  Additional reading:
  • Dependable Software by Design by Daniel Jackson. Sci. Am. 2006.
  • Classic Testing Mistakes by Brian Marick. On his pages you can find some additional reading about software testing
  • Code Coverage Analysis by Bullseye.
  • Mutation Testing by Jeff Offutt. Oluliseim artikkel: Practical Mutation Testing

• Lecture 5: (pdf) - Testing Real-Time Systems.
  
  Additional reading:
  • Monitoring, Testing and Debugging of Distributed Real-Time Systems by Henrik Thane (PDF)

• Lecture 6: (pdf) - Redundancy (HW&SW).
  
  Additional reading:
  • E. Dubrova, "Fault-Tolerant Design: An Introduction" (PDF).
    Chapter 4 (Hardware Redundancy) and 7 (Software Redundancy).
  • Zaipeng Xie, Hongyu Sun and Kewal Saluja, A Survey of Software Fault Tolerance Techniques.
  • A. Avizienis, Toward Systematic Design of Fault-Tolerant Systems
  • A. Avizienis, Dependable Computing Depends on Structured Fault Tolerance.

• Lecture 7: (pdf) - Redundancy (information, time, environment).
  
  Additional reading:
  • E. Dubrova, "Fault-Tolerant Design: An Introduction" (PDF).
    Chapter 5 (Information Redundancy) and 6 (Time Redundancy).
  • Lossless data compression, especially Arithmetic coding
  • Hamming Code

• Lecture 8:(pdf) - Enemies of dependability. Human factors. Verification, validation.
  
  Additional reading:
  • A Conversation with Bruce Lindsay Designing for failure may be the key to success. (6 pages)
  • M. Grottke, K. S.Trivedi, Fighting Bugs: Remove, Retry, Replicate, and Rejuvenate.
  • R. Mastipuram, E. C. Wee, Soft errors' impact on system reliability
  • Soft Errors in Electronic Memory - A White Paper
  • IBM experiments in soft fails in computer electronics (1978-1994)
  • ACM SIGCHI Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction - Definitions and overview

Contact:

Gert Jervan
Department of Computer Engineering
Raja 15, IT-229