1. COP 5611 Operating Systems Spring 2010
Dan C. Marinescu
Office: HEC 439 B
Office hours: M-Wd 1:00-2:00 PM

2. Lecture 13 Reading Assignment: Chapter 8 from the online textbook
Homework 3 due on March 3
Midterm: Wednesday March 17, the first week after Spring Break
Last time:
End-to-end-layer
Resource Management - Congestion
Today:
Faults, Failures and Fault-Tolerant Design
Measures of Reliability and Failure Tolerance
Tolerating active Faults
Next time 2 2 2 2 2

3. Reliable Systems from Unreliable Components
Problem investigated first in mid 1940s by John von Neumann.
Steps to build reliable systems
Error detection
Network protocols (link and end-to-end)
Error containment – limit the effect of errors
Enforced modularity: client-server architectures, virtual memory, etc.
Error masking – ensure correct operation in the presence of errors
Network protocols: error correction, repetition, interpolation for data cu real-time constrains

4. Faults and errors Fault a flaw with the potential to cause problems
Software
Hardware
Design
Implementation
Operation
Environment
Types of faults
Latent
Active
Error  the consequence of an active fault.

5. Error containment in a layered system
Several design strategies are possible. The layer where an error occurs:
Masks the error  correct it internally so that the higher layer is not aware of it.
Detects the error and report its to the higher layer  fail-fast.
Stops  fail-stop.
Does nothing.
Types of faults
Transient (caused by passing external condition)/Persistent
Soft /Hard  Can be masked or not by a retry.
Intermittent  occurs only occasionally and it is not reproducible
Latency of a fault – time until a fault causes an error
A long latency may allow errors to accumulate and defeat periodic error correction

6. The fault-tolerance design process is iterative
Begin the design of a fault-tolerant model
Identify potential faults
Estimate the risk of each one
Design methods to detect the errors for the highest risk faults.
Design methods to deal with the errors for the highest risk faults
Contain the damage from high risk errors through modularity.
Design procedures to contain the errors detected by:
Temporal redundancy (retry the operation)
Spatial redundancy (deploy multiple components)
Update the model to account for the error masking procedures
Iterate until the probability of un-tolerated faults is small
Observe the system in the real world
Study the error logs
Identify the cause of each error
Use the information collected to improve the model and iterate again

7. Measures of reliability
TTF – time to failure
MTTF – mean time to failure MTTF = 1/N ∑ TTFi
TTR – time to repair
MTTR – mean time to repair MTTR = 1/N ∑ TTRi
MTBF – mean time between failures MTBF =MTTF + MTTR
Availability =MTTF/MTBF
Down time = ( 1- Availability) = MTTR/MTBF

8. The conditional failure rate

9. Reliability functions
Unconditional failure rate
f(t) = Pr(module fails between t and t = dt)
Reliability R(t) = Pr(module functions at time t given that it was functioning at time 0). This function is memoryless

11. Active faults How to respond Errors Do nothing
Fail-fast – report the error
Fail-safe – operate in an acceptable manner (e.g., stop sign/flashing lights)
Fail-soft – operate correctly with reduced performance
Mask the error
Errors
Detectable  the error can be reliably detected.
Maskable  Correctable
Untolerated error  undetactable, dndetected, unmaskable, unmasked.

13. Fault tolerance models
Categorize all errors
Evaluate the probability of occurrence of each error. Modify the design to make the most likely errors detectable.
Implement a detection procedure for each detectable error and identify the modules in which it is detected as fail-fast.
Try to devise masking procedure for each detectable error.
Evaluate the probability of occurrence, the cost of the masking procedure and the cost of failure for each detectable error

14. Errors in analog and digital systems
Analog systems  the designer specifies a tolerance to deal with small errors.
Digital system
Spatial redundancy
Temporal redundancy
Coding
Forward error-correction.