Fault tolerant systems in military applications

Abstract

This chapter introduces some basic principles and terminology associated with the design of highly reliable computer systems, and describes two experimental, fault tolerant computer systems which have been recently developed for military applications. The first system, called ADNET, demonstrates how a dynamically reconfigurable, local area network can be constructed so that various forms of hardware failure can be tolerated. The second system illustrates how software fault tolerance techniques can be used in a real-time application in order to cope with software design faults and, thereby, improve the software reliability of the system.