Premium
Using rainbow net simulation to measure fault tolerance in a multiprocessor
Author(s) -
Johnson Allen M.,
Schoenfelder Michael A.,
Lebold David J.
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
quality and reliability engineering international
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.913
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1099-1638
pISSN - 0748-8017
DOI - 10.1002/qre.4680090110
Subject(s) - multiprocessing , fault tolerance , computer science , parallel computing , software fault tolerance , fault (geology) , measure (data warehouse) , distributed computing , embedded system , real time computing , database , seismology , geology
The Rainbow net simulation technique is applied to modelling the impact of system load and fault handling on the availability of a fault‐tolerant multiprocessor architecture. Rainbow nets are described along with the motivation for creating this modelling technique. A Rainbow net fault‐handling model is created for the fault‐tolerant multiprocessor architecture and the topology is shown to remain constant in size, independent of the number of processor, memory and I/O elements configured in the system. Simulation is performed with a varying load in terms of the number of active jobs the system must support. Results are given showing how the fault‐tolerant capability varies with load. Two new metrics for evaluating fault tolerance are introduced; namely full fault‐tolerability and partial fault‐tolerability. They are based on simple observations in the model.