William C. Carter Award

Dr. Carter was a key figure in the formation and development of the field of dependable computing and fault tolerance. His career spanned over four decades, from programming, debugging, and recovery in ENIAC, through reliability, availability and serviceability during the evolution and definition of IBM mainframes. In particular, he took great interest in the future of the field and was instrumental in promoting the work of young contributors. It was characteristic of Bill to take the initiative in reaching out to students and younger colleagues. Despite the demands of his own career, he knew the value of taking the time to encourage, mentor, and inspire newcomers to the field.

The W.C. Carter Award, which was established by the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing (TC-FTC) together with the IFIP Working Group on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance (WG 10.4), is intended to honor and carry on his legacy by recognizing an outstanding paper based on a graduate dissertation.

To qualify for the award, a paper must have been submitted to the FTCS as a regular paper and must have been either single-authored by a graduate student or co-authored by a graduate student with his or her dissertation advisor or committee member(s). Both current graduate students and former graduate students no more than two years past completion of their dissertations are eligible. The dissertation must be in the area of dependable computing. A paper is self-nominated for the Award by certifying on its title page that it has met the requirements for consideration.

All Carter Award submissions accepted by the Symposium as regular papers are evaluated by the Carter Award Committee established by the TC-FTC Chair.

In 1997 the Committee selected two winners. The prize was shared by:

• "COFTA: Hardware-Software Co-Synthesis of Hetrogeneous Distributed Embedded System Architectures for Low Overhead Fault Tolerance" by Bharat P. Dave, Princeton (Niraj K. Jha, Advisor).
• "Fail-Awareness: An Approach to Construct Fail-Safe Applications" by Christof Fetzer, University of California San Diego (Flaviu Cristian, Advisor).

In 1998 the award went to:

• "RENEW: A Tool for Fast and Efficient Implementation of Checkpoint Protocols" by Nuno Neves, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (with W. Kent Fuchs, Advisor)

The 1999 winner is:

• "The Systematic Improvement of Fault Tolerance in the Rio File Cache" by Wee Teck Ng, University of Michigan (with Peter M. Chen, Advisor)