Description of the Selected Enabling Technologies

The goal of dependability benchmarking is to provide generic ways for characterizing the behavior of components and computer systems in the presence of faults, allowing for the quantification of dependability measures. Beyond existing evaluation techniques, dependability benchmarking must provide a reproducible and cost-effective way of performing such a characterization, especially for comparative purposes. This paper proposes a framework for defining dependability benchmarks for computer systems, with particular emphasis on COTS and COTS-based systems. The multiple dimensions of the problem are discussed and the framework is presented through a set of well-defined dimensions. Examples of concrete benchmark set-ups for selected operating systems, transactional systems and embedded systems are presented and discussed.