Dependability analysis of a cache-based RAID system via fast distributed simulation

We propose a new speculation-based, distributed simulation method for dependability analysis of complex systems in which a detailed functional simulation of a system component is essential to obtain an accurate overall result. Our target example is a networked cluster with compute nodes and a single I/O node. Accurate system dependability characterization is achieved via a combination of detailed simulation of the I/O subsystem behavior in the presence of faults and more abstract simulation of the compute nodes and the switching network. Dependability measures like error coverage, error detection latency and performance measures such as delivery time in the presence of faults are obtained. The approach is implemented on a network of workstations, and experimental results show significant improvements over a Time Warp simulator for the same model