CS635
Advanced Fault Tolerant Computing
Spring 2009
Instructor: Yashwant K. Malaiya, Professor
Office: 238 US
Office Hours:
Mon, Fri: 10-11
Text:We will use material from several books, recent publications and reports.Some of the conferences, journals & books in this field.
Objectives:The course involves study of emerging and unexplored topics in highly reliable computing. Each student will search the sources of information, give class presentations of several papers from the literature, as well as work on a specific project. The project will require original research contributions. Active participation in class discussions is required from all students.
Evaluation: Distribution of points:
30-35% Presentations, discussions, research and assignments etc.
5-15% Other reports, critiques
50% Project results and reports
The major project will be evaluated based on: motivation and significance of the investigation, thoroughness of background research, originality, strength and significance of technical contributions and presentation.The major project must be chosen from a specific set of topics.
| Date | Needed |
| Feb. 17 | Project proposal |
| March 31 | Progress report |
| May 5 | Final report |
Grading: The grades are defined in this way:
| A | Excellent |
| A- | Very Good |
| B+ | Good |
| B | Satisfactory |
| Else | Bad |
| I | For exceptional cases only |
Please see the Student Information Sheet for departmental policies.
Outline: The course focuses on techniques for achieving very high reliability in computation. Topics of interest include recent advances in systems, software, hardware in the field of testing, reliability evaluation and fault tolerance. Students will be required to research specific fields, locate relevant articles, make technical presentations and participate in discussions. There will be research assignments that will require students to investigate unsolved technical problems. Here is a representative list of topics:
- Testing:
- Hard to test faults: where they occur and how to test them
- Efficient testing strategies with effectiveness evaluation,
- Random, antirandom and directed testing
- Testing using operational profile vs. input space probing
- Information extraction from VLSI test data
- Software defects and reliability:
- Characterization of correlated failures in systems
- Estimation of residual defect density in software
- Coverage based reliability growth modeling, comparison with SRGMs
- Using fine-grain resolution for estimating software reliability
- Quantitative Security:
- Quantitative characterization of security due to vulnerabilities
- Vulnerability introduction and discovery
- Vulnerabilities in evolving software
- Impact of patch development and application delays
- Vulnerability exploitation process
- Economic Issues:
- Reliability economics and optimization
- Security economics
- Test economics
- Other Topics:
- Achievement of ultrareliablity
- Software tools for software reliability/security measurement and prediction
- Quantitative measures for human reliability