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.
The most important uses of computing in the future will be those related to the global "digital convergence" where all computing becomes digital and inter-networked. This convergence will be propelled by new and advanced applications in storage, searching, retrieval and exchanging of information in a myriad of forms. All of these will place heavy demands on large parallel and distributed computer systems because these systems have high intrinsic failure rates. The challenge to the computer scientist is to build a system that is inexpensive, accessible and dependable. The chapters in this book provide insights into many of these issues and others that will challenge researchers and applications developers.
Included among these topics are fault-tolerance in communication protocols for distributed systems (including synchronous and asynchronous group communication), methods and approaches for achieving fault-tolerance in distributed systems (such as those used in networks of workstations), dependable cluster systems and scalable-coherent-interfaces-based local-area multi-processors, general models and features of distributed safety-critical systems built from commercial off-the-shelf components as well as service dependability in telecomputing systems, dependable parallel systems for real-time processing of video signals, and embedding in faulty multi-processor systems, broadcasting, system-level testing techniques, on-line detection and recovery from intermittent and permanent faults. The book is a collection of chapters with contributions by experts working on fault-resilient applications. The numerous techniques and methods covered are of relevance to researchers, developers and graduate students.
