Course Title: Dependable Systems
NTNU Code: TTM4120 Dependable systems
Lecturer: Professor Bjarne E. Helvik
Semester: Spring ;
Workload: BT: 12 ; ECTS credits: 7,5
All teaching material, except the rest of these web pages, are in English. Letures will be given in Norwegian.
Learning goal:
The students should get the
ability to
design, quantitatively evaluate and operate systems based on information and communication technologies (ICT) to meet
availability, reliability and safety requirements. They should get a firm conceptual basis, insight into fault tolerant
design, dependability modelling and analysis, as well as important dependability aspects of hardware, software and networks.
Description:
The course gives a broad introduction to the design and quantitative evaluation of
dependability in systems based on information and communication technologies (ICT). The following issues are covered:
- Dependability attributes: availability, reliability, safety, QoS;
- The failure process, failure semantics,
fault handling and maintenance;
- Methods for dependability modelling and analysis, with emphasis on reliability
block-diagrams and state diagrams (Discrete state continuous time Markov Models)
- Fault-tolerance, types of redundancy, design principles and mechanisms, the properties of designs;
- Prediction of hardware failure rates;
- Modelling of software failing, prediction of software failure intensities, impact of software failures on systems' behaviour;
- Survivability of networks, dependability evaluation of networks taking the traffic carrying (QoS) requirements into account.
As a part of the course, small groups of students will carry out a
laboratory project. During this, they will study how to provide, as
well as implement, a fault tolerant service in a distributed system by
the use of a group communication toolkit on a middelware platform.
The course includes a set of exercises in modelling and evaluation of various system designs and behaviors.
Recommended background:
Basic knowledge in ICT systems design. Basic knowledge in probability,
Markov modelling and analysis, e.g. as covered by the course "TTM4110
Dependability and performance with discrete event simulation".
Programming for lab. work.
Course material:
The material listed below are subject to change:
- Bjarne E. Helvik, "An Introduction to the Design and Evaluation
of Dependable Computing Systems and Communication Networks", Lecture
notes Department of Telematics.
- Mathematica notebooks for dependability evaluation.
- Supplementary material for the laboratory project available on the net and in the library.