A study of standard building blocks for the design of fault-tolerant distributed computer systems

This paper presents the rcsults of a study that has established a standard set of four semiconductor VU1 building-block circuits. These circuits can be assembled with off-the-shelf microprocessors and semiconductor memory modules into fault-tolerant distributed canputer configurations. The resulting multi-computer architecture uses self-checking canputer modules backed up by a limited nunber of spares. A redundant bus system is employed for cmunication between canplter modules.