Design decisions for the FTM: a general purpose fault tolerant machine

Author

Banatre, M. ; Muller, G. ; Rochat, B. ; Sanchez, P.

fYear

1991

fDate

25-27 June 1991

Firstpage

71

Lastpage

78

Abstract

The main aspects of the FTM (fault tolerant machine) architecture, which has been built by combining stable transactional memory boards with processors of a standard machine, are reviewed, and the design principles are presented. The FTM design is based on GOTHIC, a fault-tolerant distributed system that relies on stable storage technology. A fast stable transactional memory (STM) board, which offers built-in atomic operations on groups of small data structures with very good response time, has been integrated into a multiprocessor architecture, each processor possessing its own STM. The FTM hardware architecture has been built from standard open machine using dynamic redundancy in the building of the processing elements. The FTM prototype is presented, and the STM functions are described in detail.<>

Keywords

computer architecture; distributed processing; fault tolerant computing; GOTHIC; built-in atomic operations; design principles; dynamic redundancy; fault-tolerant distributed system; general purpose fault tolerant machine; hardware architecture; multiprocessor architecture; processing elements; stable storage technology; stable transactional memory; stable transactional memory boards; Aerospace control; Amplitude modulation; Availability; Computer architecture; Data structures; Electronic switching systems; Fault tolerance; Fault tolerant systems; Hardware; Telephony;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Fault-Tolerant Computing, 1991. FTCS-21. Digest of Papers., Twenty-First International Symposium

Conference_Location

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Print_ISBN

0-8186-2150-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/FTCS.1991.146636

Filename

146636