Computerizimg the Regitration Process at Universities

The University Student Registration System: a Case Study in Building a High-Availability Distributed Application Using General Purpose Components
M. C. Little, S. M. Wheater, D. B. Ingham, C. R. Snow, H. Whitfield and S. K. Shrivastava
Department of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, England.

Abstract

Prior to 1994, student registration at Newcastle University involved students being registered in a single place, where they would present a form which had previously been filled in by the student and their department. After registration this information was then transferred to a computerised format. The University decided that the entire registration process was to be computerised for the Autumn of …show more content…

The high availability requirement implies that the computerised registration system must be able to tolerate a ’reasonable’ number of machine and network related failures, and the consistency requirement implies that the integrity of stored data (student records) must be maintained in the presence of concurrent access from users and the types of failures just mentioned. It was expected that most human errors, such as incorrectly inputting data, would be detected by the system as they occurred, but some “off-line” data manipulation would be necessary for errors which had not been foreseen. Tolerance against catastrophic failures (such as complete electrical power failure, or a fire destroying much of the University infrastructure) although desirable, was not considered within the remit of the registration system. A solution that would require the University buying and installing specialist fault-tolerant computing systems, such as Tandem [1] or Stratus [2] was not considered economically feasible. The only option worth exploring was exploiting the University 's existing computing resources. Like most other universities, Newcastle has hundreds of networked computers (Unix workstations, PCs, Macs) scattered throughout the campus. A solution that could make use of these resources and achieve availability by deploying software-implemented fault-tolerance techniques certainly looked attractive.