Implementing fail-silent nodes for distributed systems

Abstract

A fail-silent node is a self-checking node that either functions correctly or stops functioning after an internal failure is detected. Such a node can be constructed from a number of conventional processors. In a software-implemented fail-silent node, the nonfaulty processors of the node need to execute message order and comparison protocols to keep in step and check each other, respectively. In this paper, the design and implementation of efficient protocols for a two processor fail-silent node are described in detail. The performance figures obtained indicate that in a wide class of applications requiring a high degree of fault tolerance, software-implemented fail-silent nodes constructed simply by utilizing standard off-the-shelf components are an attractive alternative to their hardware-implemented counterparts that do require special-purpose hardware components, such as fault-tolerant clocks, comparator, and bus interface circuits.