Hopkins, Smith and Lala to Receive 2015 Jean-Claude Laprie Award

March 27, 2015

Today, IFIP Working Group 10.4 announced that an outstanding paper has been selected as winner of the 2015 Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing:

A. L. Hopkins, Jr., T.B. Smith, III, and J.H. Lala. FTMP – A Highly Reliable Fault-Tolerant Multiprocessor for Aircraft, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 66, No. 10, October 1978.

Albert Hopkins, Basil Smith and Jay Lala provided in their highly-cited paper, FTMP – A Highly Reliable Fault-Tolerant Multiprocessor for Aircraft, the major published account of a project sponsored by the NASA Langley Research Center in the late 1970s to develop safety-critical digital computing systems for commercial flight control. These flight-control systems had a reliability requirement of the order of 10-10 failures per hour for a 10-hr flight during which no airborne maintenance would be available. The ground-breaking FTMP project was highly successful and very influential, and established the scientific and engineering foundations of ultra-reliable digital computing for mission- and safety-critical applications for a wide range of industries. It showed the feasibility of hardware-based, high-performance practical implementation of algorithms to tolerate Byzantine faults, including clock-synchronization. The project’s work on verification and validation of ultra-high reliability requirements led to a hybrid analytical-empirical V&V approach, based on fault-injection and Markov modelling, an approach that is now considered an essential element of dependability assessment. Finally, the FTMP project laid the foundation for the fault containment concept, and advanced the area of fault diagnosis.

Authors of the winning paper will be presented the award on June 23 2015 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the opening session of the Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks

About the Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing

The award was created in 2011, in honor of Jean-Claude Laprie (1944-2010), whose pioneering contributions to the concepts and methodologies of dependability were influential in defining and unifying the field of dependable and secure computing. The award recognizes outstanding papers that have significantly influenced the theory and/or practice of Dependable Computing.

For more information on the Jean-Claude Laprie Award please visit http://jclaprie-award.dependability.org

About IFIP WG 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance

IFIP Working Group 10.4 was established in 1980 with the aim of identifying and integrating approaches, methods and techniques for specifying, designing, building, assessing, validating, operating and maintaining dependable computer systems, that is those that are reliable, available, safe, and secure. Its 75 members from around the world meet twice a year to to conduct in-depth discussions of important technical topics to further the understanding and exposition of the fundamental concepts of dependable computing.

For more information on IFIP WG10.4 visit http://www.dependability.org/wg10.4/

About the International Federation For Information Processing

IFIP is a non-governmental, non-profit umbrella organization for national societies working in the field of information processing. It was established in 1960 under the auspices of UNESCO as a result of the first World Computer Congress held in Paris in 1959. It is the leading multinational, apolitical organization in Information & Communications Technologies and Sciences.

For more information on IFIP visit http://www.ifip.org

Media Contact:

Charles B. Weinstock
412-298-9747
weinstock@dependability.org