High performance technique for ultrareliable execution of tasks under both hardware and software faults

Abstract

Various studies have shown that both hardware and software are subject to failures. However, the majority of the existing works have dealt with the problem by considering that either software is fault-free but hardware is subject to failure, or hardware is fault-free but software is subject to failure. Thus, techniques for dealing with both software and hardware faults must be developed. In this work, we propose an efficient integrated fault-tolerant approach for ultrareliable execution of tasks where both hardware and software failures, and on-line fault diagnosis are considered. The proposed approach is called the Integrated Fault-Tolerant (IFT) approach. We also propose a scheduling algorithm called the Integrated Fault-Tolerant Scheduling (IFTS) algorithm based on the IFT technique.