FERRARI: a flexible software-based fault and error injection system

Author

Kanawati, Ghani A. ; Kanawati, Nasser A. ; Abraham, Jacob A.

Author_Institution

Comput. Eng. Res. Center, Texas Univ., Austin, TX, USA

Volume

44

Issue

2

fYear

1995

fDate

2/1/1995 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

248

Lastpage

260

Abstract

A major step toward the development of fault-tolerant computer systems is the validation of the dependability properties of these systems. Fault/error injection has been recognized as a powerful approach to validate the fault tolerance mechanisms of a system and to obtain statistics on parameters such as coverages and latencies. This paper describes the methodology and guidelines for the design of flexible software based fault and error injection and presents a tool, FERRARI, that incorporates the techniques. The techniques used to emulate transient errors and permanent faults in software are described in detail. Experimental results are presented for several error detection techniques, and they demonstrate the effectiveness of the software-based error injection tool in evaluating the dependability properties of complex systems

Keywords

error detection; fault tolerant computing; software fault tolerance; FERRARI; dependability properties; error detection techniques; fault-tolerant computer systems; flexible software-based fault and error injection system; permanent faults; statistics; transient errors; Analytical models; Application software; Computer errors; Delay; Error correction; Fault detection; Fault tolerant systems; Hardware; Jacobian matrices; Switches;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computers, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9340

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/12.364536

Filename

364536