Today we are living through a boom in the software and hardware fields, mainly motivated by what is called the Internet of Things (IoT). It is obvious that hardware improvements can no longer be accomplished without fault-tolerant software. The tiny dimensions and the fast production times required by most of the electronic components of modern computers and gadgets make them ideal candidates for transient and permanent faults. Consequently, reliable software has to take control of those imperfections, allowing the end user to get the desired results.
The authors present a broad body of state-of-the-art software techniques that alleviate the costly and decaying solution of redundant hardware. In order to achieve successful fault-tolerant software, it is important to understand the deep relationship that the hardware plays in the system and how faults there can be masked by the software layers.
The book is written in a logical way, from the fundamentals to the state-of-the-art solutions. Current software reliability methods follow a hierarchical structure: each layer focuses on particular issues, but exchanges information with other layers.
Key ingredients to get a reliable solution deal with modeling and estimation, that is, being aware of the cause-effect relationships between faults and responses. This is the main topic of chapters 3 and 4. The central point of chapters 5 and 6 is the analysis of optimization-based methods to be applied under certain constraints. Special mention must be made of the multicore solutions. A case study closes the book. Here, the authors show the parameters required to compare some of the solutions previously mentioned.
The text also covers the key--but still in its infancy--topic of aging on circuits, that is, the degradation on the chip’s performance over months or years of operation.
The attached appendices are especially welcome for interested readers and potential students, because here the authors describe some simulators and the source code of various algorithms. A web page with open-source material completes the book.