Fail-stop

In distributed computing, a fail-stop failure is a failure model in which a processor or process stops executing instead of performing an incorrect state change that other components could observe. The halt is detectable by other processors, and a designated portion of storage remains readable after the failure. Richard D. Schlichting and Fred B. Schneider introduced the fail-stop processor as a programming abstraction for building fault-tolerant computer systems in 1983. The model sits at the mild end of a spectrum of failure assumptions that also includes silent crash (halting) failures and Byzantine faults. It is an idealization. A perfect fail-stop processor cannot be built with a finite amount of hardware, because enough faults could disable every error detector. Practical designs therefore approximate it with a k-fail-stop processor that behaves as specified unless more than k component failures occur.

In distributed computing, a fail-stop failure is a failure model in which a processor or process stops executing instead of performing an incorrect state change that other components could observe. The halt is detectable by other processors, and a designated portion of storage remains readable after the failure. Richard D. Schlichting and Fred B. Schneider introduced the fail-stop processor as a programming abstraction for building fault-tolerant computer systems in 1983. The model sits at the mild end of a spectrum of failure assumptions that also includes silent crash (halting) failures and Byzantine faults. It is an idealization. A perfect fail-stop processor cannot be built with a finite amount of hardware, because enough faults could disable every error detector. Practical designs therefore approximate it with a k-fail-stop processor that behaves as specified unless more than k component failures occur.

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1377096097 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.