On the Practical Application of a Quantitative Model of System Reconfiguration Due to a Fault

If a processor develops a permanent fault during the execution of a task on a dynamically reconfigurable parallel machine, three recovery options are task migration to a fault-free subdivision, task migration to another submachine, and task redistribution. Quantitative models of these three reconfiguration schemes are analyzed, together with the cost of making the wrong choice, to develop guidelines for selecting among these methods in a practical dynamic reconfiguration implementation. A multistage cube or hypercube inter-processor network is assumed. The PASM and nCUBE 2 parallel machines are used as vehicles for studying the model parameters.