CS635
Advanced Fault Tolerant Computing
Fall 2012

Instructor: Yashwant K. Malaiya, Professor
Office: 356 CSB
Office Hours: T,Th 11:00-11:50

Text:We will use material from several books, recent publications and reports.Some of the conferences, journals & books in this field.

On-line resources

Objectives: The course involves study of emerging and unexplored topics in highly reliable and secure computing. Each student will

o   Read and discuss assigned papers in the class

o   Exhaustively search and identify the key the sources of information (journals, conference proceedings, technical press, and technical reports)

o   Give class presentations based on the literature found, as well as one’s own work on a specific project.

The project will require original research contributions. Active participation in class discussions is required from all students, including critiquing the work of fellow students and giving suggestions.

Evaluation: Distribution of points:

• 20-25% Presentations
• 10-15% Class participation: questions, comments, interaction
  
15-25% Summaries and critiques

50-55% 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
Sept 17	Project proposal
Oct 29	Progress report
Nov 26	Final draft report
Dec 11	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  list of topics:

• 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
  • Cloud computing 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
  • Cloud security
• Economic Issues:
  • Reliability and test economics and optimization
  • Security economics
  • Disaster recovery implementations
• Other Topics:
  • Achievement of ultrareliablity
  • Software tools for software reliability/security measurement and prediction
  • Quantitative measures for human reliability
• 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