Effect of fault tolerance and communication delay on response time in a multiprocessor system with a bus topology

The effect of interprocessor communication and fault tolerance on the response time of N processors (nodes) interconnected through a bus type communication medium is discussed. Deterministic as well as probabilistic approaches are considered. Four correction methods to handle the unprocessed data by the faulty processor(s) are studied and compared. It is found that the effect of interprocessor communication and fault tolerance on the response time for communication-extensive programs (I/O bound) is more than that for computation-extensive programs (CPU bound). It is also found that the effect of fault tolerance on the response time is significant, and cannot be ignored when evaluating the performance of multiprocessor systems. We have shown that the work presented in this paper for a bus topology can be generalized and readily adopted by other multiprocessor network topologies.