A fault secure dictionary machine

Abstract

A fault-secure dictionary machine is presented in this paper. The symmetry of the binary tree architecture for a dictionary machine is exploited to obtain fault-secureness with little overhead. The proposed design utilizes only one extra processor and with some other modifications to the structure of the processors, can detect a single failure of a processor or a link. The proposed design keeps two copies of each record and whenever a record is extracted from the machine the two copies are compared to detect if any fault has occurred. The low overhead is a result of observing the fact that at any given time all the processors of the machine need not be active and these potentially-idle processors are used to do redundant processing to enable detecting single faults.