On the impact of hardware faults - An investigation of the relationship between workload inputs and failure mode distributions

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• Technology scaling of integrated circuits is making transistors increasingly sensitive to process variations, wear-out effects and ionizing particles. This may lead to an increasing rate of transient and intermittent errors in future microprocessors. In order to assess the risk such errors pose to safety critical systems, it is essential to investigate how temporary errors in the instruction set architecture (ISA) registers and main memory locations influence the behaviour of executing programs. To this end, we investigate - by means of extensive fault injection experiments - how such errors affect the execution of four target programs. The paper makes three contributions. First, we investigate how the failure modes of the target programs vary for different input sets. Second, we evaluate the error coverage of a software-implemented hardware fault tolerant technique that relies on triple-time redundant execution, majority voting and forward recovery. Third, we propose an approach based on assembly language metrics which can be used to correlate the dynamic fault-free behaviour of a program with its failure mode distribution obtained by fault injection.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Datorsystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Computer Systems (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

dependability assessment

failure mode distributions

fault injection

microprocessor faults

software-implemented hardware fault tolerance

Hardware fault tolerance

Mode distribution

Computer architecture

Computer hardware

Errors

Fault tolerance

Hardware

Microprocessor chips

Security of data

Failure modes

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)