Incorporating Fault Tolerance at the Application Level

PI的初步工作表明，可以利用应用程序级信息来大大减少处理瞬时故障所需的冗余量，瞬时故障是迄今为止最常见的故障类型。 例如，在雷达目标跟踪应用中，我们的方法只需要15%的冗余，以提供完整的容错对瞬态故障。 ALFT的另一个用途是在处理器永久故障的情况下提供临时补丁，允许系统有更多的时间来执行恢复算法。ALFT与其他容错方法正交，因此它可以单独使用或与它们结合使用。 例如，设计人员可以使用ALFT来防止瞬变，并以线路可更换备件的形式提供少量的硬件冗余，以处理永久性故障。本项目的目标是开发应用级容错策略，并研究其对各种实时应用的有效性。 主要的重点将是推广我们的方法，包括尽可能多的不同类型的应用程序，开发最合适的策略，为每种应用程序类型和评估开发计划的效率。

Preliminary work by the PIs has shown that application-level information can be exploited to greatly reduce the amount of redundancy required to deal with transient failures, which are by far the most common type of failure. For example, in a radar target-tracking application, our approach required only 15% redundancy to provide complete fault-tolerance against transient faults. Another use of ALFT is in providing a temporary patch in the event of a permanent processor failure, allowing the system more time to execute a recovery algorithm.ALFT is orthogonal to other approaches to fault-tolerance, so that it can be used either by itself or in combination with them. For example, a designer might use ALFT to guard against transients, and make a small amount of hardware redundancy available, in the form of line-replaceable spares, to deal with permanent failures.The objective of this project is to develop Application-Level Fault Tolerance strategies and investigate theireffectiveness for various classes of real-time applications. The main focus will be to generalize our approach to include as many different types of applications as possible, develop the most suitable strategy for each application type and evaluate the efficiency of the developed scheme.