A Fault-Tolerant Java Virtual Machine Using Fast Rejuvenation for Soft-Error-Prone Systems

To achieve better performance, computer designers employ advanced techniques that shrink feature sizes, lower supply voltage, increase clock rates and memory capacity, and meanwhile modern computers become increasingly vulnerable to soft errors caused by energetic particles, such as alpha particles and neutron strikes. Therefore, fault tolerance evolves into one of the most significant design objectives, especially for embedded systems working under extreme environments, such as space project. Techniques both in hardware and software are presented. Most of these techniques, however, either require extra resources (e.g. redundant component) or cause great performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a novel fault tolerant technique for Java Virtual Machine (JVM) called the warm-JVM rejuvenation, which can proactively correct soft errors. This approach periodically performs JVM rejuvenation during the execution of Java applications. The experiments show that our approach can improve the JVM reliability and maintain performance and response time.