Lec 15 MIT 6.033 Computer System Engineering, Spring 2005
-- is the next group of topics in 6.033 call fault tolerance. And the goal here is to learn how to build reliable systems. An extreme case, or at least our ideal goal, is to try to build systems that will never fail. And what will find is that we really can't do that, but what we'll try to do is to build systems which maybe fail less often than if you built them without the principles that we're going to talk about. So the idea is how to build reliable systems. So in order to understand how to build reliable systems, we need to understand what makes systems unreliable. And that has to do with understanding what faults are. What problems occur in systems that cause systems to fail? And you've actually seen many examples of faults already. Informally, a fault is just some kind of a flaw or a mistake that causes a component or a module not to perform the way it's supposed to perform. And we'll formalize this notion a little bit today as we go along. S...