The course covers the design and development of fault-tolerant systems, where fault-occurrences may lead to financial loss or may have catastrophic consequences.

Application areas: safety—space, defense, transport and medical applications; availability—cluster and cloud applications; telecommunication, banking and infrastructure grids, systems-of-systems; reliability—software and hardware design and implementation.

Project: the students can choose their own project topic (a large list of suggested topics is available); literature surveys; presentation of existing techniques; tool use on case studies; software and hardware implementations, etc.

Passing the course will enable participants to: understand and use the concepts and terminology in the field; understand and evaluate the dependability attributes of fault-tolerant systems, such as safety, reliability and availability; analyze, design and implement fault-tolerant systems.

• Define the fundamental concepts of dependability
• Identify the hazards and risks associated with a system
• Be familiar with the state-of-the art models and techniques
• Apply reliability and safety analysis techniques
• Define and classify the different types of redundancy techniques
• Compare and contrast any two given redundancy techniques
• Be familiar with and apply software reliability techniques
• Propose solutions to improve the dependability of a system

Fault-tolerant systems: application areas
Fundamental concepts: fault, error, failure
Reliability analysis of software and hardware
Hazard and risk analysis
Fault tolerance: the concept of redundancy
Software, hardware, information and time redundancy; checkpointing; fault-tolerant networks
Developing safety-critical systems: the safety life-cycle; certification standards

Israel Koren and C. Mani Krishna, Fault-Tolerant Systems, Morgan Kaufmann (available online)
Selected book chapters and research papers (available online)