Single point of failureA single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. SPOFs are undesirable in any system with a goal of high availability or reliability, be it a business practice, software application, or other industrial system. Systems can be made robust by adding redundancy in all potential SPOFs. Redundancy can be achieved at various levels. The assessment of a potential SPOF involves identifying the critical components of a complex system that would provoke a total systems failure in case of malfunction.
Self-replicating spacecraftThe concept of self-replicating spacecraft, as envisioned by mathematician John von Neumann, has been described by futurists including physicist Michio Kaku and discussed across a wide breadth of hard science fiction novels and stories. Self-replicating probes are sometimes referred to as von Neumann probes. Self-replicating spacecraft would in some ways either mimic or echo the features of living organisms or viruses.
Page faultIn computing, a page fault (sometimes called PF or hard fault) is an exception that the memory management unit (MMU) raises when a process accesses a memory page without proper preparations. Accessing the page requires a mapping to be added to the process's virtual address space. Besides, the actual page contents may need to be loaded from a backing store, such as a disk. The MMU detects the page fault, but the operating system's kernel handles the exception by making the required page accessible in the physical memory or denying an illegal memory access.
Jackson networkIn queueing theory, a discipline within the mathematical theory of probability, a Jackson network (sometimes Jacksonian network) is a class of queueing network where the equilibrium distribution is particularly simple to compute as the network has a product-form solution. It was the first significant development in the theory of networks of queues, and generalising and applying the ideas of the theorem to search for similar product-form solutions in other networks has been the subject of much research, including ideas used in the development of the Internet.
