On the Reliability of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing Systems

Abstract

The designer of a fault-tolerant distributed system faces numerous alternatives. Using a stochastic model of processor failure times, we investigate design choices such as replication level, protocol running time, randomized versus deterministic protocols, fault detection and authentication. We use the probability with which a system produces the correct output as our evaluation criterion. This contrasts with previous fault-tolerance results that guarantee correctness only if the percentage of faulty processors in the system can be bounded. Our results reveal some subtle and counterintuitive interactions between the design parameters and system reliability.