The emerging discipline of responsive systems demands fault-tolerant and real-time performance in uniprocessor, parallel, and distributed computing environments. The new proposal for responsiveness measure is presented, followed by an introduction of a model for responsive computing. The model, called CONCORDS (CONsensus/COmputation for Responsive Distributed Systems), is based on the integration of various forms of consensus and computation (progress or recovery). The consensus tasks include clock synchronization, diagnosis, checkpointing scheduling and resource allocation.

In this paper the two different paradigms for the design of responsive, i.e., distributed fault-tolerant real-time systems, the event-triggered (ET) approach and the time-triggered (TT) approach, are analyzed and compared. The comparison focuses on the temporal properties and considers the issues of predictability, testability, resource utilization, extensibility, and assumption coverage.