Teaching Resilient Computing: Proposal of an MSc Curriculum

The adjective resilient has been in use for decades in the field of dependable computing systems essentially as a synonym of fault-tolerant, thus generally ignoring the unexpected aspect of the phenomena the systems may have to face. These phenomena become of primary relevance when moving to systems like the future large, networked, evolving systems constituting complex information infrastructures — perhaps involving everything from super-computers and huge server "farms" to myriads of small mobile computers and tiny embedded devices, with humans being central part of the operation of such systems. Such systems are in fact the emergence of the ubiquitous systems that will support Ambient Intelligence. From an educational point of view, very few Universities, if any, are offering a comprehensive and methodical curriculum that is able to provide students with a sufficient preparation that makes them able to cope with the challenges posed by the design of ubiquitous systems. In Europe an activity has started towards the identification of proper technologies for ubiquitous systems and for proposing an MSc curriculum in Resilient Computing as a timely and necessary answer to the requirements posed by the design of such systems. To this aim, a European Network of Excellence ReSIST – Resilience for Survivability in IST – was run from January 2006 to March 2009 (see http://www.resist-noe.org/). In this paper, resilience is first introduced as a mandatory property for ubiquitous systems and the requirements related to educational issues are discussed. The main part of the paper is devoted to the presentation of the proposed MSc curriculum in Resilient Computing.