Dependable Systems Research Group - University of Coimbra (Portugal)
The University of Coimbra in Portugal is one of the oldest in Europe, having been founded in 1289. It has about 20.000 students, of which 9.000 are in the Faculty of Science and Technology, in whose Department of Informatics Engineering the Dependable Systems Group is located, as part of a research center called CISUC. That group has been active since 1987, is presently led by Prof. João Gabriel Silva and Prof. Henrique Madeira, and includes 3 other professors, 6 Ph.D. students and 11 Master's students.
The main area of activity of the group has been the study of experimental techniques for the evaluation and validation of fault-tolerant systems by fault injection. Several pin-level fault-injectors have been developed in the past. More recently software based fault injectors for the T805, PowerPC and Pentium processors have been built (the Xception tool). They all have been extensively used to evaluate various systems. For instance, the RIFLE fault injector, a pin-level injector, has been used in co-operation with the Brazilian Space Agency for the validation of the navigation computer of a future Brazilian Satellite. The Xception fault injector has been further developed by Critical Software and is now in use for instance in NASA.
Other research areas in which the Dependable Systems research group is active are database management systems (DBMS) dependability, behaviour based error detection and fault-tolerance in parallel computing.
The group now participates in an european project called DBench, and has participated in several others in the past, as well as in many national research projects.