Generating and Executing Dependable Application Software on UnReliable Embedded Systems (Get-SURE) - II

随着计算机系统中的硬件组件由于技术扩展而变得更加不可靠，由软错误(例如，瞬时故障)和永久性错误(例如，老化)引起的硬件错误已成为不可避免的。因此，开发有效的硬件和软件技术来提高系统的可靠性对系统设计人员来说至关重要。该研究方案旨在通过跨层采用可靠性驱动的编译、离线和在线软件技术来提高可靠性，同时考虑不可靠的硬件组件。为了弥合硬件和软件技术之间的差距，以实现高可靠性，该项目将探索软件弹性建模(考虑适当的硬件级故障模型)和优化，以引导系统软件和应用软件生成(通过编译器)提高可靠性。在我们的资助阶段I(2013-2014)降低了错误概率之后，我们的资助阶段II(2015-2016)的这份提案研究了可靠性指导的编译和系统软件技术，以及在过程变化和老化影响下的协作多粒度错误检测和恢复。具体地，我们将探索：(1)考虑具有不同硬化级别的核的可靠性/弹性、应用和执行时间模型；(2)老化影响下的可靠性驱动的编译器后端和链接器；(3)编译器驱动的多粒度错误检测和恢复模式的设计和优化；(4)针对多核系统的功率/性能约束的可靠性优化；以及(5)编译器引导的错误检测和恢复的运行时支持。线下和在线技术都是必需的，并将在该项目中进行探索，以便找到如何使它们相互适应的有效手段。

As hardware components in computer systems have become more unreliable due to the technology scaling, hardware errors, resulting from soft errors (e.g., transient faults) and permanent errors (e.g., aging), have become unavoidable. It is, therefore, crucial for system designers to exploit effective hardware and software techniques to improve the dependability. This research proposal aims to achieve dependability improvement by adopting reliability-driven compilation, offline and online software techniques in a cross-layer fashion while considering unreliable hardware components. To bridge the gap between hardware and software techniques for achieving a high degree of reliability, the project will explore software resilience modeling (considering the proper hardware-level fault models) and optimization to guide system software and application software generation (through compiler) towards reliability improvement. After reducing the error probabilities in our funding phase-I (2013-2014), this proposal for our funding phase-II (2015-2016) investigates reliability-guided compilation and system software techniques with collaborative multi-granularity error detection and recovery under process variations and aging effects. In particular, we will explore: (1) reliability/resilience, application, and execution time models considering cores with heterogeneous hardening levels; (2) reliability-driven compiler back-end and linker under aging effects; (3) compiler-driven design and optimization of multi-granularity error detection and recovery modes; (4) power-/performance-constrained reliability optimization for manycore systems; and (5) compiler-guided run-time support for error detection and recovery. Both offline and online techniques are required and will be explored in the project in order to find effective means of how to adapt them to each other.