FTMP: a protocol for distributed fault tolerant operating system services

The authors discuss the design of a highly redundant distributed fault-tolerant environment based on the fault-tolerant monitor protocol (FTMP). An implementation of this protocol was developed on a 16-node 4-by-4 planar-2 mesh of Sun Sparcstations running UNIX. The implementation provided fully distributed reliability services to applications in a highly redundant, loosely coupled, distributed network. These services were based on five abstractions: projects, tasks, ports, critical files, and objects. The purpose of these abstractions was to provide a reliable computing environment for complex distributed applications such as autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) control systems which require a high degree of reliability and unattended availability. This approach has been shown to be feasible and capable of dealing with hardware and software items. When combined with an AUV control system it also has been shown to meet the mission requirements of an AUV