Slow advances in fault-tolerant real-time distributed computing

Abstract

Is fault-tolerant (FT) real-time computing a specialized branch of FT computing? The key issue in real-time (RT) computing is to economically produce systems that yield temporal behavior which is relatively easily analyzable and acceptable in given application environments. Fault-tolerant (FT) RT computing has been treated by the predominant segment of the FT computing research community as a highly specialized branch of FT computing. This author believes that the situation should be changed. It seems safe to say that FT techniques for which useful characterizations of temporal behavior have not been or cannot be developed, are at best immature, if not entirely useless. This means that FT RT computing is at the core of FT computing.