Static typing for a faulty lambda calculus

A transient hardware fault occurs when an energetic particle strikes a transistor, causing it to change state. These faults do not cause permanent damage, but may result in incorrect program execution by altering signal transfers or stored values. While the likelihood that such transient faults will cause any significant damage may seem remote, over the last several years transient faults have caused costly failures in high-end machines at America Online, eBay, and the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, among others [6, 44, 15]. Because susceptibility to transient faults is proportional to the size and density of transistors, the problem of transient faults will become increasingly important in the coming decades. This paper defines the first formal, type-theoretic framework for studying reliable computation in the presence of transient faults. More specifically, it defines zap, a lambda calculus that exhibits intermittent data faults. In order to detect and recover from these faults,...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICFP
• Authors: David Walker, Lester W. Mackey, Jay Ligatti, George A. Reis, David I. August
• Keywords: ICFP 2006, Intermittent Data Faults, Programming Languages, Transient Faults, Transient Hardware Faults