A Distributed Recovery Block Approach to Fault-Tolerant Execution of Application Tasks in Hypercubes

An approach to fault-tolerant execution of real-time application tasks in hypercubes is proposed. The approach is based on the distributed recovery block (DRB) scheme and does not require special hardware mechanisms in support of fault tolerance. Each task is assigned to a pair of processors forming a DRB computing station for execution in a dual-redundant and self-checking mode. Assignment of all tasks in an application in such a form is called the full DRB mapping. The DRB scheme was developed as an approach to uniform treatment of hardware and software faults with the effect of fast forward recovery. However, if the system developer is concerned with hardware fault possibilities only, then forming DRB stations becomes a mechanical process not burdening the application software designer in any way. A procedure for converting an efficient nonredundant task-to-processor mapping into an efficient full DRB mapping is presented. >

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