COMPUTER RELIABILITY STUDY.

A report is presented concerning reliability synthesis techniques which are based upon the unique characteristics of control computers as opposed to those of data processors, and which are realizable with present-day computer construction technology. These techniques are based on the assumptions that control systems can tolerate some wrong stimulations from the control computer, but cannot tolerate long down-time, and that degradations in computer capability can be tolerated. These assumptions allow for the use of software, in addition to hardware, for the generation of the reliability synthesis techniques, and thus minimize the hardware penalty commonly associated with hardware only techniques redundancy. However, due to the use of software in these techniques which are applied at the subsystem level, there is generally a degradation in accuracy of computation andor computational capability which is associated with the occurrence of each failure. Author