FREA: a distributed program reliability analysis program

The authors present an algorithm for computing distributed program reliability in distributed computing systems (DCSs). The algorithm, called FREA (fast reliability evaluation algorithm), is based on the generalized factoring theorem with several incorporated reliability-preserving reductions to speed up reliability evaluation. The effect of file distributions, program distributions, and various topologies on reliability of the DCS was studied by using the proposed algorithm. Compared with existing algorithms on various network topologies, file distributions, and program distributions, the proposed algorithm was much more economic in both time and space. To compute the distributed program reliability, the ARPA network is studied to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm.<>