Survey of fault tolerance techniques for shared memory multicore/multiprocessor systems

Abstract

With the advent of modern nano-scale technology, it has become possible to implement multiple processing cores on a single die. The shrinking transistor sizes however have made reliability a concern for such systems as smaller transistors are more prone to permanent as well as transient faults. To reduce the probability of failures of such systems, online fault tolerance techniques can be applied. These techniques need to be efficient as they execute concurrently with applications running on such systems. This paper discusses the challenges involved in online fault tolerance and existing work which tackles these challenges. We classify fault tolerance into four different steps which are proactive fault management, error detection, fault diagnosis and recovery and discuss related work for each step, with focus on techniques for shared memory multicore/multiprocessor systems. We also highlight the additional difficulties in tolerating faults for parallel execution on shared memory multicore/multiprocessor systems.