Design decisions for the FTM: a general purpose fault tolerant machine

Abstract

The main aspects of the FTM (fault tolerant machine) architecture, which has been built by combining stable transactional memory boards with processors of a standard machine, are reviewed, and the design principles are presented. The FTM design is based on GOTHIC, a fault-tolerant distributed system that relies on stable storage technology. A fast stable transactional memory (STM) board, which offers built-in atomic operations on groups of small data structures with very good response time, has been integrated into a multiprocessor architecture, each processor possessing its own STM. The FTM hardware architecture has been built from standard open machine using dynamic redundancy in the building of the processing elements. The FTM prototype is presented, and the STM functions are described in detail.<>