Building Error Resilient Software on Next Generation Computing Platforms

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As computer systems become smaller and faster, their reliability becomes an important concern. One way of achieving high reliability is to design the system with many redundant components, so that it can continue operating even if some of them fail. However, this approach entails significant costs in power and energy consumption, which are very important in next generation computer systems such as smartphones and data centers. Therefore, we need new methods to ensure the reliability of future computer systems that does not rely upon redundant hardware.***We propose to tolerate hardware errors at the application software level, by building software that is resilient to hardware faults.  The main rationale for doing so is that few errors make their way up the system stack to affect the application, and even the ones that do are not necessarily important to the application. Therefore, it is much more efficient to protect software applications from (most) hardware faults, without adding significant amounts of redundancy. The main challenge however is that it is difficult for programmers to reason about hardware faults at the software level, and to protect their applications without expending a huge amount of effort. Our goal is to completely automate the process of making applications error resilient and reasoning about them, without burdening the programmer. This requires novel techniques for program (static) analysis, formal methods, and empirical evaluations, which this proposal will focus on. ***By leveraging the research in this proposal, next generation computer systems will be able to deliver higher performance and energy efficiency, even while operating reliably. This in turn can lead to higher adoption of mobile computing and smart phones, as well as more energy-efficient internet data centers. These are the drivers of economic growth, and as such, the research in this proposal has significant potential impact on these domains. Further, the HQP trained in this project will acquire important skills to design and validate reliable computer systems, which is becoming more important as computer systems are becoming more complex. Finally, the research proposed can lead to significant energy savings for next generation computer systems, which are predicted to occupy a substantial fraction of the total energy consumption costs by 2020, thus benefiting society as a whole.**