Towards understanding the effects of intermittent hardware faults on programs

Author

Rashid, Layali ; Pattabiraman, Karthik ; Gopalakrishnan, Sathish

Author_Institution

Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

fYear

2010

fDate

June 28 2010-July 1 2010

Firstpage

101

Lastpage

106

Abstract

Intermittent hardware faults are bursts of errors that last from a few CPU cycles to a few seconds. They are caused by process variations, circuit wear-out, and temperature, clock or voltage fluctuations. Recent studies show that intermittent fault rates are increasing due to technology scaling and are likely to be a significant concern in future systems. We study the propagation of intermittent faults to programs; in particular, we are interested in the crash behaviour of programs. We use a model of a program that represents the data dependencies in a fault-free trace of the program and we analyze this model to glean some information about the length of intermittent faults and their effect on the program under specific fault and crash models. The results of our study can aid fault detection, diagnosis and recovery techniques.

Keywords

fault diagnosis; fault tolerant computing; program diagnostics; CPU cycle; circuit wear out; data dependency; fault detection; fault diagnosis; fault free trace; intermittent hardware fault; process variation; recovery technique; voltage fluctuation; Circuit faults; Clocks; Computer crashes; Computer errors; Fault detection; Fault diagnosis; Hardware; Information analysis; Temperature; Voltage fluctuations;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Dependable Systems and Networks Workshops (DSN-W), 2010 International Conference on

Conference_Location

Chicago, IL

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-7729-6

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-7728-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/DSNW.2010.5542613

Filename

5542613