In Praise of Fault Tolerant Systems

“Fault attacks have recently become a serious concern in the smart card industry. “Fault Tolerant Systems” provides the reader with a clear exposition of these attacks and the protection strategies that can be used to thwart them. A must read for practitioners and researchers working in the field.”

David Naccache, Ecole normale supérieure

“Understanding the fundamentals of an area, whether it is golf or fault tolerance, is a prerequisite to developing expertise in the area. Krishna and Koren’s book can provide a reader with this underlying foundation for fault tolerance. This book is particularly timely because the design of fault-tolerant computing components, such as processors and disks, is becoming increasingly important to the mainstream computing industry.”

Shubu Mukherjee, Director, FACT-AMI Group, Intel Corporation

“Professors Koren and Krishna, have written a modern, dual purpose text that first presents the basics fault tolerance tools describing various redundancy types both at the hardware and software levels followed by current research topics. It reviews fundamental reliability modeling approaches, combinatorial blocks and Markov chain techniques. Notably, there is a complete chapter on statistical simulation methods that offers guidance to practical evaluations as well as one on fault-tolerant networks. All chapters, which are clearly written including illuminating examples, have extensive reference lists whereby students can delve deeper into almost any topic. Several practical and commercial computing systems that incorporate fault tolerance are detailed. Furthermore, there are two chapters introducing current fault tolerance research challenges, cryptographic systems and defects in VLSI designs.”

Robert Redinbo, UC Davis

“The field of Fault-Tolerant Computing has advanced considerably in the past ten years and yet no effort has been made to put together these advances in the form of a book or a comprehensive paper for the students starting in this area. This is the first book I know of in the past 10 years that deals with hardware and software aspects of fault tolerant computing, is very comprehensive, and is written as a text for the course.”

Kewal Saluja, University of Wisconsin, Madison