Dependable Systems Research Group - University of Coimbra (Portugal)

The University of Coimbra in Portugal is one of the oldest in Europe, having been founded in 1289. It has about 20.000 students, of which 9.000 are in the Faculty of Science and Technology, in whose Department of Informatics Engineering the Dependable Systems Group is located. That group has been active since 1987, is presently led by Prof. João Gabriel Silva and Prof. Henrique Madeira, and includes 2 other professors, 6 Ph.D. students and 11 Master's students.
The main area of activity of the group has been the study of experimental techniques for the evaluation and validation of fault-tolerant systems by fault injection. Several pin-level fault-injectors have been developed in the past. More recently software based fault injectors for the T805, PowerPC and Pentium processors have been built. They all have been extensively used to evaluate various systems. For instance, the RIFLE fault injector, a pin-level injector, has been used in co-operation with the Brazilian Space Agency for the validation of the navigation computer of a future Brazilian Satellite.
Other research areas in which the Dependable Systems research group is active are database management systems (DBMS) dependability, behaviour based error detection and fault-tolerance in parallel computing.
The experience of the group members in developing DBMS based applications is also extensive - a particularly significant example has been the recent development by us of the Portuguese system to control the fishing activities, (called SIFICAP) including control of the fishing quotas - a very large system with more than 4000 users involving the Portuguese Navy, Air Force, Port Authorities, Fishing Authorities and several Police Forces.
The group has also participated in project ESPRIT IV- 23516 - “WINPAR - Windows Based Parallel Computing”, project ESPRIT III - 6731 "FTMPS - A Practical Approach to Fault-Tolerance for Massive Parallel Systems", and project EUREKA 1921 - "JAMES - Management of Telecommunication and Data Networks using Mobile Agents and Java", besides a number of Portuguese funded projects.

Relevant Publications

H. Madeira, M. Vieira and D. Costa, “On the Emulation of Software Faults by Software Fault Injection”, Proc. IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-2000), New York, USA, pp. 417-426, June 25-28, 2000 (IEEE CS Press)..
D. Costa, T. Rilho and H. Madeira, “Joint Evaluation of Performance and Robustness of a COTS DBMS Through Fault-Injection Proc. IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-2000), New York, USA, pp. 251-260, June 25-28, 2000 (IEEE CS Press).
J. Carreira, H. Madeira, J. G. Silva, "Xception: A technique for the evaluation of dependability in modern Computers", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 24, No. 2, February 1998, pp. 125-136.
M. Z. Rela, H. Madeira and J. G. Silva, "Experimental Evaluation of the Fail-Silent Behaviour in Programs with Consistency Checks " Proc. 26th IEEE International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing (FTCS-26), June 1996, Sendai, Japan, pp 394-403, (IEEE CS Press).
J. Gabriel Silva, J. Carreira H. Madeira, D. Costa and F. Moreira "Experimental Assessment of Parallel Systems" Proc. 26th IEEE International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing (FTCS-26), June 25-26, 1996, Sendai, Japan, pp 415-424, (IEEE CS Press).
H. Madeira and J. G. Silva· "Experimental evaluation of the fail-silent behavior in computers without error masking", Proc. 24th IEEE Fault Tolerant Computing Symposium, FTCS 24, Austin, USA, June 1994, pp. 350-359, (IEEE CS Press).

CVs of Key persons to be involved

Henrique Madeira is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Engineering of the University of Coimbra, where he has been involved in the research on dependable computing since 1986. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Coimbra in 1994. His main research interests focus on experimental evaluation of dependable computing systems and error detection mechanisms, subjects on which he has authored or co-authored more than forty papers. Currently, taking advantage of his experience on giving lectures on database systems, he is also doing research on the evaluation of the transaction mechanisms available in commercial database management systems. He has co-ordinated two research projects funded by the Portuguese government and has been in charge of the development of several fault injectors, both pin-level and software based. He also was responsible for several tasks in the ESPRIT project 6731 "FTMPS - A Practical Approach to Fault-Tolerant Massively Parallel Systems". He is currently the Vice-Chair of the IFIP Working Group 10.4 Special Interest Group (SIG) on Dependability Benchmarking, established in the summer of 1999 by IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance. He has been asked to be referee for several international conferences and journals and he has served on program committees of the major conferences of the Fault-Tolerance area.

João Gabriel Silva is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra. He has been involved in the research on dependable computing since 1986. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Coimbra in 1988. He has published many papers on fault-injection, error detection mechanisms, dependable distributed computing and parallel programming. From 1980 to 1984, he led the development group that designed the first Portuguese personal computer to be produced commercially. He has participated in many industry-university co-operation projects. More recently, he co-ordinated the University of Coimbra participation in the ESPRIT project 6731 "FTMPS - A Practical Approach to Fault-Tolerant Massively Parallel Systems" and the ESPRIT Project 23516 " Winpar - Windows Based Parallel Computing". He was the Program Co-Chair of the second European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC-2), and has been a member of the Program Committee of many International Conferences including the IEEE International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing, the European Workshop on Dependable Computing and the Euromicro Workshop on Dependable Systems.