Aircraft today employ computers to perform isolated functions. If a computer fails, its tasks are assumed by the aircrew without loss of life or cargo. Soon aircraft will require an on-board realtime computer to perform flight critical control functions. If such a computer were to fail, the craft would be unable to fly. One study by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in its Aircraft Energy Efficiency Program required the probability of failure be less than 10-9 at ten hours. This specified failure rate translates to less than one failure per million years of operations. Two multiprocessor systems designed to these specifications, SIFT and FTMP, have been delivered to NASA's AIRLAB. This paper describes the application of a portion of a validation methodology to NASA's Fault-Tolerant MUltiprocessor System (FTMP) and the Software Implemented Fault-Tolerance (SIFT) computer system. The methodology entails a building block approach, starting with simple baseline experiments and building to more complex experiments. The goal of the validation methodology is to thoroughly test and characterize the performance and behavior of ultrareliable computer systems. The validation methodology presented in this paper showed the methodology is not machine specific and can be used in lieu of life testing approaches. By applying a building block approach at the systems level, the machine complexity was broken down to manageable levels independent of system implementation.
Fault-free performance validation of avionic multiprocessors
Realisierung fehlerfreier Eigenschaften von Multiprozessoren fuer die Avionik
1986
8 Seiten, 4 Bilder, 2 Tabellen, 10 Quellen
Conference paper
English
Avionic systems performance assessment
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