An Integrated Approach to Transputer-based Fa Ixt-tolerant System Design with Special Emphasis on Global State Consistency Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy ^engineering) of Jadavpur University

1 Introduction The design of fault-tolerant systems is a challenging problem. It requires close attention to many issues, e.g., the fault-model, the connectivity of the system topology, the concurrent programming paradigm used (say, for instance, synchronous message passing), the message transfer delays of the communication network, the support for scheduling real-time processes, etc. A vast amount of work has already been done in this field. However, there is a noticeable lack of a unified theory of design. In this scenario, we strongly feel the necessity of a design methodology that integrates different techniques to build a system that has satisfactory behaviour. This is the motivation behind the present work.