Dependability Analysis of Heterogeneous Distributed Systems

Distributed computing is an enabling technology for many current and future application areas and is increasingly pervasive. Distributed systems consisting of interconnected sets of dissimilar hardware or software systems are commonly referred to as heterogeneous distributed systems. As a consequence of large scale, heterogeneity is often inevitable in distributed systems. Furthermore, often heterogeneity is preferred by many users because heterogeneous distributed systems provide the flexibility to their users of different computer platforms for different applications. A Markov model of the Heterogeneous distributed system (HDS) with a circular consecutive F n of out k : − − − configuration is developed and the availability and reliability measures are obtained.