A context saving fault tolerant approach for a shared memory many-core architecture

Mechanisms for runtime fault-tolerance in many-core architectures are mandatory to cope with transient and permanent faults. This issue is even more relevant with aggressive technology nodes due to process variability, aging effects, and susceptibility to upsets, among other factors. This work proposes to save periodically the context and to re-schedule tasks to the last reliable known state and avoid the faulty processor. This technique is implemented on an embedded multicore architecture named P2012. The proposed fault-tolerant approach induces a limited overhead of 9.37% in an industrial image processing application while guaranteeing a full-error recovery if any error is detected.