scholarly journals Cross-Layer Resilience Against Soft Errors: Key Insights

2020 ◽  
pp. 249-275
Author(s):  
Daniel Mueller-Gritschneder ◽  
Eric Cheng ◽  
Uzair Sharif ◽  
Veit Kleeberger ◽  
Pradip Bose ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soft Errors ◽  
Error Resilience ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Accurate Estimation ◽  
Cross Layer ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Technology Scaling ◽  
Safety Critical ◽  
Radiation Induced ◽  
Hardware Faults

AbstractDriven by technology scaling, integrated systems become more susceptible to various causes of random hardware faults such as radiation-induced soft errors. Such soft errors may cause malfunction of the system due to corruption of data or control flow, which may lead to unacceptable risks for life or property in safety-critical applications. Hence, safety-critical systems deploy protection techniques such as hardening and redundancy at different layers of the system stack (circuit, logic, architecture, OS/schedule, compiler, software, algorithm) to improve resiliency against soft errors. Here, cross-layer resilience techniques aim at finding lower cost solutions by providing accurate estimation of soft error resilience combined with a systematic exploration of protection techniques that work collaboratively across the system stack. This chapter demonstrates how to apply the cross-layer resilience principle on custom processors, fixed-hardware processors, accelerators, and SRAM memories (with a focus on soft errors) and presents key insights obtained.

scholarly journals SCCharts - Language and Interactive Incremental Compilation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Motika
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Reactive Systems ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Model Transformations ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Safety Critical ◽  
Incremental Model ◽  
Software Models ◽  
Safety Critical Systems

Safety-critical systems are a subclass of reactive systems, a dominating class of computer systems these days. Such systems control the airbags in our cars, the flaps of an aircraft, nuclear power plants or pace makers. Software for these systems must be reliable. Hence, a language and tooling is needed that allows to build and maintain reliable software models. Furthermore, a reliable compiler is required to obtain decent machine-understandable and executable code from highly abstract models. This thesis presents SCCharts, a Statecharts-based synchronous and visual modeling language for specifying and designing safety-critical systems and for deriving their implementations. It elaborates on why a control-flow oriented and synchronous language is desirable and how incremental language features are chosen to flatten learning curve. It presents an interactive incremental model transformation based compilation approach termed SLIC. It shows how SLIC helps in supporting both, the modeler and the tool smith for building reliable models and maintaining a reliable compiler, respectively. A SLIC-based compiler for SCCharts including its high-level model transformations is presented. Furthermore, practicality aspects of the KIELER SCCharts language and tooling implementation complete the considerations to validate the proposed approach.

Programming-level and redundancy-free method for enhancing software reliability against transient errors in hardware

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bahman Arasteh ◽  
Reza Solhi
Keyword(s):  
Software Reliability ◽  
Supply Voltage ◽  
Fault Injection ◽  
Soft Errors ◽  
Transient Errors ◽  
Radiation Induced ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Hardware Faults ◽  
Program Reliability ◽  
Recovery Blocks

Software play remarkable roles in different critical applications. On the other hand, due to the shrinking of transistor size and reduction in supply voltage, radiation-induced transient errors (soft errors) have become an important source of computer systems failure. As the rate of transient hardware faults increases, researchers have investigated software techniques to control these faults. Performance overhead is the main drawback of software-implemented methods like recovery blocks that use technical redundancy. Enhancing the software reliability against soft errors by utilizing inherently error masking (invulnerable) programming structures is the main goal of this study. During the programming phase and at the source code level, programmers can select different storage classes such as automatic, global, static and register for the data into their program without paying attention to their inherent reliability. In this study, the inherent effects of these storage classes on the program reliability are investigated. Extensive series of profiling and fault-injection experiments were performed on the set of benchmark programs implemented with different storage classes. Regarding the results of experiments, we find that the programs implemented with automatic storage classes have inherently higher reliability than the programs with static and register storage classes without performance overhead. This finding enables the programmers to develop highly reliable programs without technical redundancy and performance overhead.

scholarly journals SCCharts - Language and Interactive Incremental Compilation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Motika
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Reactive Systems ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Model Transformations ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Safety Critical ◽  
Incremental Model ◽  
Software Models ◽  
Safety Critical Systems

Safety-critical systems are a subclass of reactive systems, a dominating class of computer systems these days. Such systems control the airbags in our cars, the flaps of an aircraft, nuclear power plants or pace makers. Software for these systems must be reliable. Hence, a language and tooling is needed that allows to build and maintain reliable software models. Furthermore, a reliable compiler is required to obtain decent machine-understandable and executable code from highly abstract models. This thesis presents SCCharts, a Statecharts-based synchronous and visual modeling language for specifying and designing safety-critical systems and for deriving their implementations. It elaborates on why a control-flow oriented and synchronous language is desirable and how incremental language features are chosen to flatten learning curve. It presents an interactive incremental model transformation based compilation approach termed SLIC. It shows how SLIC helps in supporting both, the modeler and the tool smith for building reliable models and maintaining a reliable compiler, respectively. A SLIC-based compiler for SCCharts including its high-level model transformations is presented. Furthermore, practicality aspects of the KIELER SCCharts language and tooling implementation complete the considerations to validate the proposed approach.

Towards Transparent Control-Flow Integrity in Safety-Critical Systems

2020 ◽  
pp. 290-311
Author(s):  
Don Kuzhiyelil ◽  
Philipp Zieris ◽  
Marine Kadar ◽  
Sergey Tverdyshev ◽  
Gerhard Fohler
Keyword(s):  
Control Flow ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Safety Critical ◽  
Control Flow Integrity ◽  
Safety Critical Systems

Generation of testing script based on XML for safety-critical systems

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 281-285
Author(s):  
Huan HE ◽  
Zhong-wei XU ◽  
Gang YU ◽  
Shi-yu YANG
Keyword(s):  
Critical Systems ◽  
Safety Critical ◽  
Safety Critical Systems
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document