Design of a fault-tolerant, modular computer with dynamic redundancy

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the results of a design study for a Modular Spacecraft Computer (MSC). The MSC is a fault-tolerant computer that is designed to preserve the continuity and correctness of its programs in the presence of both transient malfunctions and permanent failures in its hardware. The MSC is designed to detect and to implement recovery from faults without external assistance. The fault-tolerance goals are to provide a reliability of 0.95 for a five-year period of unattended operation and to provide recovery from a specified class of repetitive transient malfunctions, bounded by maximum repetition rate and maximum duration specifications, during that time period.

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