Dependable Systems (Sommersemester 2010)

Lecturer:
Course Website: https://www.dcl.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/teaching/depend/

General Information

Weekly Hours: 4
Credits: 6
Graded: yes
Enrolment Deadline: 14.05.2010
Teaching Form:
Enrolment Type: Compulsory Elective Module

Programs

IT-Systems Engineering MA

Description

Continous service provisioning is a key feature of modern hardware und software server systems. These systems achieve their level of user-perceived availability through a set of formal and technical approaches, commonly summarized under the term dependability.

Dependability is defined as the trustworthiness of hardware and software systems, so that reliance can be placed on the service they provide. The main dependability attributes commonly known and accepted are availability, reliability, safety, and security.

The Dependable Systems course gives an introduction into theoretical foundations, common building blocks and example implementations for dependable IT components and systems. The focus is on reliability and availability aspects of dependable systems, such as reliability analysis, fault tolerance, fault models or failure prediction. Amongst other things, the following topics are covered:

Dependability definitions and metrics
Design patterns for fault tolerance
Analytical evaluation of system dependability
Hardware dependability approaches
Software dependability approaches
Latest research topics

The knowledge gained from the lectures has to be applied in practical project work. Students need to form groups of 2-3 persons and work jointly on a dependability experiment from one of the topics given below. Each of the topics is supervised by a member of the Operating Systems and Middleware Group:

Clustering of OpenVMS installations for high availability (Bernhard Rabe)
Comparing clustering solutions for J2EE application servers (Frank Feinbube, Robert Wierschke)
VMWare Fault Tolerance - Feature analysis (Bernhard Rabe)
Dependability analysis of railroad design alternatives (Uwe Hentschel, Jan-Arne Sobarnia)
Software-implemented fault injection - Survey and feature analysis (Peter Tröger)
FT CORBA
Windows Cluster Services for High Availability
Linux HA Cluster - Available solutions and their properties

Requirements

Students taking this course need to have basic knowledge in operating systems and middleware technology.

Literature

The complete list of recommended readings is available on a separate page. The list is constantly updated during the course.

Learning

On request of at least one participant, the course will be given in English.

Examination

The course contains of two modules: Lectures and the group projects. The successful completion of the project work demands practical experiments in one of the given topics. The results of these experiments must be described in a written report. The pass-grading of the report is the mandatory precondition for taking the oral exam. The final course grade is the oral exam grade.

Dates

Lectures:

Tue, 13:00 - 14:30
Wed, 13:00 - 14:30

Project Decision / Final Course Enrollment: May 14

Project Report Submission: July 31

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