Adaptive Software-Implemented Fault Tolerance for Networked Systems (Project Summary)
This project will conduct an experimental study to investigate developing a set of general-purpose, fault tolerance services in a networked environment. The research will focus on designing a software-implemented fault tolerance (SIFT) layer, Chameleon, which will provide fault tolerance services to user applications, manage user processes across the network, provide rapid error detection, and initiate recovery from errors in the hardware, the operating system, applications, and the SIFT layer. In other words, Chameleon will protect all of the key components in a distributed system, including itself.
Our primary objective in developing Chameleon is to define and demonstrate the SIFT architecture, which includes static and dynamic reconfigurability and an extensive suite of error detection and recovery protocols in an integrated environment.
We will investigate ways to make Chameleon both statically and dynamically reconfigurable. Dynamic reconfigurability will allow Chameleon to change the level of reliability services that it provides during the lifetime of the target. In addition, Chameleon will be constructed to facilitate the creation of new fault tolerance techniques for the hardware, operating system, and applications. For static reconfigurability, we envision providing a library of fault tolerance techniques from which a customized fault tolerance solution can be provided to a target application. A specific solution will be composed of a range of distributed error detection and recovery techniques to provide the level of dependability required by the application.
