18/1989 : Tolerating Transient Faults in MARS

RR Number

18/1989

Conference

20th IEEE Symposium on Fault Tolerant Computing, June 1990

Author(s)

Hermann Kopetz, Heinz Kantz, G�nter Gr�nsteidl, Johannes Reisinger

Abstract

Transient faults form the dominant fault class in many computer systems. These transient faults can impair individual computations and corrupt the internal state of a computational unit, thus giving rise to permanent malfunction. Because of their transient nature and short duration, it is dificult to detect and locate transient faults. This paper discusses the concepts of transient fault handling in the MARS (MAintainable Real-time System) architecture. After an overview of the MARS architecture, the mechanisms for the detection of transient faults are discussed in detail. In addition to extensive checks in the hardware and in the operating system, time redundant execution of application tasks is proposed for the detection of transient faults. The time difference between the effective and the maximum execution time of an application task is used for this purpose. Whenever a transient fault has been detected, the affected component is turned off and reintegrated immediately by retrieving the uncorrupted state of the actively redundant partner component. In order to reduce the probability of spare exhaustion (in the case of permanent faults) "shadow components" are introduced. The reliability improvement, which can be realized by these techniques, is calculated by detailed reliability models of the architecture, where the parameters are based on experimental results measured on the present MARS prototype implementation.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Kopetz:FTCS1990,
  author =       "Hermann Kopetz and Heinz Kantz and G{\"u}nter Gr{\"u}nsteidl and Peter Puschner and Johannes Reisinger",
  title =        "Tolerating Transient Faults in MARS",
  booktitle =      "Proc. 20th IEEE Symposium on Fault Tolerant Computing",
  year =         "1990",
  month =        "Jun.",
  pages =     "466-473"
}

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