Rapids: A simulator testbed for distributed real-time systems

Embedded parallel and distributed computing systems for real-time applications are becoming commonplace. Many such real-time applications are life-critical and as a result require extensive fault-tolerance capabilities in order to ensure very high reliability. At the same time, cost, power, weight, and volume constraints require that any introduced redundancy must be efficiently used. Thus, a failure-recovery strategy must be implemented to allow the system to efficiently manage its resources in the presence of one or more failures, while attempting to continue the execution of the current tasks without missing their deadlines. We have developed such a resource-management algorithm, which selects the optimal failure recovery procedure to be employed when a processor failure is detected. This paper describes a testbed which provides a framework to simulate various distributed real time systems and to validate such fault recovery algorithms.