IBM 610 workstation computer 3431

I see a wide chasm in terminology and understanding.

Symetric Multi-Processing is ONLY the facility that allows you to continue to add processors to linearly scale computing capacity.

By itself, it says nothing about fault tolerance. You may believe that that it does from your background, but to most of the rest of the world, it doesn't. SMP merely exists to enable the garbage to be generated more quickly.

Most SMP systems don't even support hot-pluggable CPU or CPU modules. Try to hot-plug most of them and you'll bring down the whole thing in a puff of smoke.

Non-stop computing is a luxury for the vast bulk of systems that can and do benefit from SMP. If there's a CPU fault, they will probably crash and the failed CPU will simply not be "found" should the system be able to reboot without further physical intervention. That's the limit of fault tolerance.

You're thinking of SMP being synonymous with non-stop computing. That simply ain't so. -- "Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia ASCII ribbon campaign "Laws do not persuade just because X against HTML mail they threaten." and postings Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c. 4BC - 65AD.