Improving reliability through task recomputation in heterogeneous multi-core embedded systems

As the demand for high performance and computational complexity continue to increase in embedded systems, reliability issues are becoming limiting factors on application scalability and long-term survivability in the harsh conditions in which such systems are operated. As embedded systems already house large datasets, traditional techniques to improve reliability such as task redundancy can be very costly in terms of memory space consumption. In this paper, we propose an approach that utilizes idle time frames of computational resources in order to iteratively recompute tasks to increase reliability of overall design without incurring any additional execution latency, area or extra memory space. We present experimental evaluation that shows the effectiveness of the proposed task recomputation approach using both task graphs extracted from benchmarks and automatically-generated task graphs.