Hardware and Software Fault Tolerance: Definition and Evaluation of Adaptive Architectures in a Distributed Computing Environment

This paper discusses the issue of providing tolerance to both hardware and software faults by defining several hybrid-fault-tolerant architectures, which can co-exist and work simultaneously at the top of the supporting environment, and introduces a systematic method for evaluating their dependability, efficiency and response time. To address general-purpose distributed systems where multiple unrelated applications may compete for system resources, our architectural solutions have an important concern with adaptation in the use of redundancy according to system conditions.