Programming-level and redundancy-free method for enhancing software reliability against transient errors in hardware
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Published:2021-11-13
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Volume:
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ISSN:0218-5393
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Container-title:International Journal of Reliability, Quality and Safety Engineering
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language:en
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Short-container-title:Int. J. Rel. Qual. Saf. Eng.
Author:
Arasteh Bahman1,
Solhi Reza2
Affiliation:
1. Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Science, Istinye University, Istanbul, Turkey
2. Department of Computer Engineering, Ahar Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahar, Iran
Abstract
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.
Publisher
World Scientific Pub Co Pte Ltd
Subject
Electrical and Electronic Engineering,Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering,Energy Engineering and Power Technology,Aerospace Engineering,Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality,Nuclear Energy and Engineering,General Computer Science