Building Error Resilient Software on Next Generation Computing Platforms

随着计算机系统变得越来越小和更快，它们的可靠性成为一个重要的问题。实现高可靠性的一种方法是设计具有许多冗余组件的系统，以便即使其中一些组件发生故障，系统也可以继续运行。然而，这种方法在电力和能源消耗方面需要大量成本，这在下一代计算机系统（例如智能手机和数据中心）中非常重要。因此，我们需要新的方法来确保未来不依赖冗余硬件的计算机系统的可靠性。我们建议容忍硬件错误的应用软件级别，通过构建软件，是有弹性的硬件故障。 这样做的主要理由是，很少有错误会沿着系统堆栈向上影响应用程序，即使是那些错误也不一定对应用程序很重要。因此，在不增加大量冗余的情况下，保护软件应用程序免受（大多数）硬件故障的影响要有效得多。然而，主要的挑战是，程序员很难在软件层面上推理硬件故障，并且在不花费大量精力的情况下保护他们的应用程序。我们的目标是完全自动化的过程，使应用程序的错误弹性和推理，而不增加程序员的负担。这就需要新的程序（静态）分析技术、形式化方法和经验评估，而这正是本提案所关注的。* 通过利用本提案中的研究，下一代计算机系统将能够提供更高的性能和能源效率，即使在可靠运行的情况下。这反过来又会导致移动的计算和智能手机的更高采用率，以及更节能的互联网数据中心。这些都是经济增长的驱动力，因此，本提案中的研究对这些领域具有重大的潜在影响。此外，在这个项目中培训的HQP将获得设计和验证可靠的计算机系统的重要技能，随着计算机系统变得越来越复杂，这变得越来越重要。最后，所提出的研究可以为下一代计算机系统节省大量能源，预计到2020年，下一代计算机系统将占总能源消耗成本的很大一部分，从而使整个社会受益。

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.**