A Module-Sharing Scheme to Fault-Tolerant Multiprocessors

Abstract

This paper presents a module-sharing scheme for constructing global fault-tolerant multiprocessors which, not limited to special topologies, can apply to any general multiprocessor systems. The system is constructed from modules in which one spare node in any module can serve to replace and faulty node in the same module or in any other remote module. Therefore, the proposed scheme possesses global sharing capability and achieves maximum utilization of spares. To meet such requirements, a reconfiguration strategy is developed to replace faulty nodes by allocating available spares. The findings demonstrate that in most cased the strategy successfully reconfigure the architecture and requires one additional replacement step in a few cases. Compared to certain other global schemes, the proposed scheme achieves the same measure of reliability at less hardware cost. Employing hardware of the same cost, the proposed scheme achieves higher reliability than certain other modular schemes. Our findings conform that the proposed scheme is superior to other analogous systems.