Friedrich-Alexander Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, FAU (Germany)

The Department of Computer Structures is one of the 10 departments in Computer Science of the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. At FAU research on parallel computers and fault tolerance has a long tradition. Mainly the development of hard- and software fault tolerance mechanisms and their evaluation by fault injection and simulation tools have been performed within national and EU funded research projects. To compare alternative design approaches and to evaluate the performance and dependability already during the early design phase the use of modelling and evaluation tools is mandatory.

FAU has been participating in several related projects: Within the MEMSY project a scalable, parallel NUMA-architecture has been developed and realised with 80 processors. Fault tolerance mechanisms in hardware as well as in software have been developed within MEMSY and the Esprit project FTMPS. A result of the VERIFY project is a dependability evaluation tool by fault injection. Moreover, the simulative and analytical evaluation tools SimPar and PANDA for the analysis of timed Petri-nets, have been developed. FAU has been involved in the Esprit project 27439 - HIDE for modelling and transformation assessment. Currently, the group con-sists of 6 senior researchers and 7 PhD students and has experience in the scientific co-operation in the frame of national and international funded research projects.

Relevant publications

Dal Cin, M.: "Verifying fault-tolerant behavior of state machines", Proc. Second IEEE High- Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE 97), Bethesda, Maryland, 1997
Dal Cin, M.: "Checking Modification Tolerance", Proc. IEEE High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE 98), Bethesda, Maryland, pp. 9-12, 1998.
Dal Cin, M.; Hohl, W.; Sieh, V.: "Hardware-Supported Fault Tolerance for Multiprocessors", Proc. Architektur von Rechensystemen (ARCS'97), Rostock, VDE-Verlag, pp. 13- 22, 1997.
Sieh, V.; Tschäche, O.; Balbach, F.: "Comparing Different Fault Models Using VERIFY", Proc. 6th Conference on Dependable Computing for Critical Applications (DCCA-6), Grainau, Germany, pp. 59-76, 1997.
Sieh, V.; Tschäche, O.; Balbach, F.: "VERIFY: Evaluation of Reliability Using VHDL-Models with Embedded Fault Descriptions", Proc. 27th IEEE Symposium on Fault Tolerant Computing (FTCS-27), Seattle (WA) 1997, pp. 32-36, 1997.

CVs of Key persons to be involved

Mario Dal Cin is a Professor of Computer Science at FAU, where he teaches courses on “Introduction to Computer Science”, “Computer Architecture”, ”Design and Evaluation of Dependable Computing Systems”, and "Embedded Fault-tolerant Systems”. Before joining the FAU he was member of the Universities of Miami, Tübingen, and Frankfurt. He conducted sev-eral research projects financed by the DFG, the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk, and EU. He has chaired the most important International Conferences in Fault-Tolerant and Dependable Computing, as FTCS, SRDS, FRDS, IPDS, and DCCA and has served several times on the corresponding Program Committees. He is a member of IFIP W.G. 10.4 “Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerance”, of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Computer System Science and Engi-neering and of the series on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerant Systems of Springer Verlag.

Wolfgang Hohl received his diploma in Mathematics from FAU. Since 1972 he is with the De-partment of Computer Structures of the FAU, presently as Akademischer Oberrat. He is head-ing the research group on fault tolerance. Current research interests include error detection, diagnosis in parallel systems, and dependability evaluation. He served as a member of Program Committees and as Finance and Organisation Chairman of international conferences. He was involved in the co-ordination of national and international projects (SFB-DFG, BMBF, ES-PRIT, ERASMUS/SOCRATES, TEMPUS) and was the co-ordinator of the Esprit project 27439 - HIDE.

Oliver Tschäche is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Computer Science 3 of FAU where he gives courses on "Usage and Programming Unix Systems" and "Structure and Technology of Computer Systems". He received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering from FAU at 1996. His PhD thesis deals with implementation of fault tolerant systems and evaluation of fault tolerant characteristics of these systems.