Software Encoded Processing: Building Dependable Systems with Commodity Hardware

In future, the decreasing feature size and the reduced power supply will make it much more difficult to built reliable microprocessors. Economic pressure will most likely result in the reliability of microprocessors being tuned for the commodity market. In the dependability domain we expect the continued spreading of mixed-mode computing systems, i.e., systems that execute both critical and non-critical functionality. To permit the efficient execution of non-critical applications and the correct execution of critical applications, we introduce the concept of Software Encoded Processing (SEP). SEP enforces a crash failure semantics of the underlying CPU. It does not require the source code of encoded programs and provides probabilistic guarantees. To achieve this, arithmetic codes and signatures are used to detect corrupted data and faulty executions of programs.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SAFECOMP
• Authors: Ute Wappler, Christof Fetzer
• Keywords: Mixed-mode Computing Systems, Non-critical Functionality, Reliable Microprocessors, SAFECOMP 2007