Fault tolerant parallel processing architectures for safety-critical applications

With the advent of parallel processing redundancy, in the form of multiple microprocessors is automatically available. There is now much interest in trying to exploit this redundancy for fault tolerance while at the same time utilising the increased processing power. In such systems dynamic reconfiguration and graceful degradation can be employed presenting many interesting challenges to system developers. In the article the experiences of developing these systems using transputers for safety-critical real-time control systems is discussed. Although the work highlights aircraft applications many of the ideas proposed can be translated to other application areas.