FAULT INJECTION BASED DEPENDABILITY ANALYSIS

Abstract

In more recent years there has been a rapid increase in the use of fault tolerant systems. The majority of computer systems, even those which are not labeled as fault tolerant have some built-in fault tolerant features. Accordingly, the need for dependability evaluation tools is increasing. These tools may help the system designer in the validation of the fault tolerance specification of their systems. A portable, general purpose evaluation.environment (called DEEP, Dependability Evaluation Experimental Package) was developed for the dependability analysis of fault tolerant systems. Our objective was to design a general purpose tool both in the sense of the target machine type and fault conditions as well. A special emphasis was given to a realistic fault injection scheme. The test environment was implemented for the dependability analysis of the Mod-ular Expandable Multiprocessor SYstem MEMSY, developed at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. In the paper the developed dependability environment (DEEP) is treated. The system structure and the detailed description of the modules are introduced. The paper contains the description of the reimplementation work of the developed portable system for the master-checker simulation as well. Experimental results of the evaluation of the MEMSY system are presented.