The principal investigator (PI) will continue research in areas of diagnosis of multi-processor systems at the system level and of Very Large Systems Integration (VLSI) intermodule routing. Research in the first area assumes a computing system consisting of a large number of autonomous interconnected modules which have the capability of testing one another to identify faulty modules. The PI will continue his work in developing adaptive diagnostic algorithms with parallel testing to improve fault testing time in this kind of system, modifying the Kuhl-Reddy algorithm which includes incomplete information refining a simple diagnosis algorithm for n-cube multi-processor computing systems, and analyzing the relationship between distributed diagnosis and the Byzantine Agreement. The PI also will explore the diagnosis of fault problems associated with "corners" in VLSI conducting paths that connect terminals on a chip. This research will include developing improved approximation algorithms for special cases of the vertex-coloring problem of graph theory that can be applied to multiple-layer routing problems associated with designing and testing conducting paths.
