Dealing with Inexactnesss in Fault-Tolerant Systems

本研究的短期目标是设计和评估一般的解决方案，在容错系统中的值的不准确性的问题。长期目标是了解并行和分布式系统中固有冗余的最佳利用方式，以提供高度可靠的多计算环境。 不精确性的来源包括舍入误差、噪声、量化误差、不同的软件、非确定性、异质性和冗余传感器。 不精确问题包括近似协议、不精确协议、时钟同步、传感器融合、不同的软件和不精确投票。 在这个项目中，将开发新的解决方法来处理并行和分布式系统中的不精确性，并将研究一个统一的方法来研究不精确性问题。 在该项目中开发的技术将进行分析评估，并在工作站测试平台的网络。 这项研究预计将导致更有效和更强大的技术来处理容错系统中的不精确性。 这些技术的效果将是提高最终结果的精度，降低冗余的通信开销，并提高整个系统的可靠性。

The short-term objectives of this research are to design and evaluate general solutions to the problem of inexactness of values in fault-tolerant systems. The long-term goals are to understand the ways in which inherent redundancy in parallel and distributed systems can best be exploited to provide highly dependable multicomputing environments. Sources of inexactness include round-off error, noise, quantization error, diverse software, non-determinism, heterogeneity, and redundant sensors. Inexactness problems include approximate agreement, inexact agreement, clock synchronization, sensor fusion, diverse software, and inexact voting. In this project, new solution techniques for dealing with inexactness in parallel and distributed systems will be developed, and a unifying methodology for studying inexactness problems will be investigated. Techniques developed in the project will be evaluated analytically and in a network of workstations testbed. This research is expected to lead to more efficient and more powerful techniques for dealing with inexactness in fault-tolerant systems. The effect of these techniques will be increased precision of final results, lower communication overhead for redundancy, and increased overall system reliability.