Abstract-Because of excessive resource requirements, error detection mechanisms in real computing systems cannot usually be made complete, i.e., their coverage is less than 100 percent. This fact in turn implies that an error may propagate through system components before it is detected. The main purpose of this paper is to develop an error propagation model and methods to compute and measure the model parameters, i.e., distributions of error propagation times, rather than applying the model to various design and analysis problems. A digraph model is used to represent a multimodule computing system and error propagation in the system is modeled by general distributions of error propagation times between all pairs of modules. Two algorithms are developed to systematically and efficiently compute the distributions of error propagation times. Experiments are also conducted to measure the distributions of error propagation times within the fault-tolerant multiprocessor (FTMP). Statistical analysis of experimental data shows that the error propagation times in FTMP do not follow a well-known distribution, the Weibull distribution, thus justifying the use of general distributions in our model. Index Terms-Digraph, distribution and density functions of error propagation times, error propagation, experiment on FTMP, statistical analysis.
Error propagation in hardware is also addressed in REF , where a stochastic propagation model based on error propagation times is described.
Modeling and measurement of error propagation in a multimodule computing system
IEEE Trans. Computers
IEEE Trans. Computers
Computer Science