High Level Design Proof of a Reliable Computing Platform

Abstract

An architecture for fault-tolerant computing is formalized and shown to satisfy a key correctness property. The reliable computing platform uses replicated processors and majority voting to achieve fault tolerance. Under the assumption of a majority of processors working in each frame, we show that the replicated system computes the same results as a single processor system not subject to failures. Sufficient conditions are obtained to establish that the replicated system recovers from transient faults within a bounded amount of time. Three different voting schemes are examined and proved to satisfy the bounded recovery time conditions.