Real-time task reallocation in fault-tolerant distributed computer systems

Abstract

We address the issue of real-time task reallocation due to the failure of one or more processors in a software implemented fault-tolerant system. The incremental and total task reallocation problems are discussed, and a heuristic procedure for both problems is proposed. Computational experiments with the heuristic on the total task reallocation problem produce near perfect system reconfigurations. Further experiments with a slightly modified version of the heuristic show that excellent quality system reconfigurations are obtainable with minimal computational effort.