ECE 254 / CPS 225 - Fault-Tolerant and Testable Computing Systems

ECE 254 / CPS 225

Fault-Tolerant and Testable Computing Systems

Fall 2008

Professor Daniel J. Sorin

Course Objective and Content

Objective: To provide students with an understanding of fault tolerant computers, including both the theory of how to design and evaluate them and the practical knowledge of real fault tolerant systems.

Content: The main themes of this course are: technological reasons for faults, fault models, information redundancy, spatial redundancy, backward and forward error recovery, fault-tolerant hardware and software, modeling and analysis, testing, and design for test.

The course includes a project that will allow the students to apply what they have learned in class.

Prerequisites: ECE 152 or CPS 104 or consent of instructor.

Class Location and Hours

Class meets M/W/F from 10:20am - 11:10am.

Location: 201 Hudson Hall

Instructor

Professor Daniel J. Sorin

Office: 209C Hudson Hall

Office Hours: Weds 11:10-12:00, Thurs 11:00-12:00

Email: Email Address of Daniel Sorin

Textbook

There is no textbook for this course. If you still think you'd like one, let me know and I can recommend one.

Assignments and Grading

Students are responsible for:

homework (due at beginning of class on specified day) - 35% of grade
midterm exam - 20% of grade (midterm Fall 2004, midterm Fall 2006)
final exam - 25% of grade (final Fall 2004, final Fall 2006)
individual or group project (due at beginning of class on specified day) - 20% of grade

The project is a significant assignment that requires:

written proposal (no more than 2 pages), due Fri, Oct 17
written progress report (no more than 3 pages), due Fri, Nov 7
final document (no more than 10 pages), due Fri, Nov 21
final presentations (in class), Nov 21 and Nov 24

Deadlines will be enforced except under extreme circumstances. I would prefer that you turn in something not quite done on the due date rather

than waiting until after the deadline to try to finish it. Each day late will result in a 10% reduction of the grade given.

Academic Misconduct: I will not tolerate academically dishonest work. This includes cheating on the homework and exams and plagiarism on the project.

Be careful on the project to cite prior work and to give proper credit to others' work.

Course Topics, Lecture Notes, and Readings

I will post lecture notes (in PDF format) the night before I cover them in class. Feel free to print them out and bring them to class with you.

Topic	Readings
Introduction: Terminology and Metrics
Faults and Their Causes slides - part1 slides - part2	"IBM Experiments in Soft Fails in Computer Electronics" (Ziegler), "Designing Reliable Systems from Unreliable Components: The Challenges of Transistor Variability and Degradation" (Borkar), "A Large-Scale Study of Failures in High-Performance Computing Systems" (Schroeder and Gibson), "Why Do Internet Services Fail, and What Can be Done About It?" (Oppenheimer et al.)
General Fault Tolerance Concepts - Physical redundancy - Error detecting/correcting codes - Re-execution techniques - Backward error recovery slides - part 1 slides - part 2 slides - part 3 slides - part 4	"The Teramac Custom Computer: Extending the Limits with Defect Tolerance" (Culbertson et al.), "Razor: A Low-Power Pipeline Based on Circuit-Level Timing Speculation" (Ernst et al.) [you can skip the part on "counterflow pipelining"], "AR-SMT: A Microarchitectural Approach to Fault Tolerance in Microprocessors" (Rotenberg), "A Survey of Rollback-Recovery Protocols in Message-Passing Systems" (Elnozahy et al.), "End-to-End Arguments in System Design (Saltzer et al.)
Using Hardware to Tolerate Faults slides - part 1 slides - part 2	"RAS Strategy for IBM S/390 G5 and G6" (Mueller et al.), "Argus: Low-Cost, Comprehensive Error Detection in Simple Cores" (Meixner and Sorin), "Configurable Isolation: Building High Availability Systems with Commodity Multi-Core Processors" (Aggarwal et al.)
Using Software to Tolerate Faults slides - part 1 slides - part 2 slides - part 3	"SWIFT: Software Implemented Fault Tolerance" (Reis et al.), "Proactive Management of Software Aging" (Castelli et al.), "Software Implemented Fault Tolerance: Technologies and Experience" (Huang and Kintala), "Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture" (Barroso et al.),
Modeling and Evaluation slides - part 1 slides - part 2	"Modeling the Effect of Technology Trends on the Soft Error Rate of Combinational Logic" (Shivakumar et al.), "A Systematic Methodology to Compute the Architectural Vulnerability Factors for a High-Performance Microprocessor" (Mukherjee et al.), [OPTIONAL] "The Impact of Technology Scaling on Lifetime Reliability" (Srinivasan et al.)
Testing, Design for Test, and Verification slides - part 1 slides - part 2 slides - part 3	"Validating the Pentium 4 Microprocessor" (Bentley and Gray), "I_DDQ Test: Will It Survive the DSM Challenge?" (Sabade and Walker), "EXE: Automatically Generating Inputs of Death" [you don't have to read sections 3 and 4 in depth] (Cadar et al.)

Homework Assignments

Homework #1, Due Monday, Sept 15 in class

Homework #2, Due Monday, Sept 29 in class

Homework #3, Due Monday, Oct 27 in class

Homework #4, Due Monday, Nov 17 in class

Tentative Schedule (subject to change)

Note that there are several 75-minute classes. These will be held from 10:05-11:20.

Week	Monday	Wednesday	Friday
Aug 25	introduction	faults and their causes	faults and their causes
Sep 1	75-minute class: "IBM Experiment in Soft Fails"; "Designing Reliable Systems"	75-minute class: "A Large-Scale Study of Failures"; "Why Do Internet Services Fail?"	75-minute class: basic FT concepts
Sep 8	Prof. Sorin Out of Town --- NO CLASS
Sep 15	75-minute class: physical redundancy; "The Teramac"	information redundancy	re-execution techniques
Sep 22	"AR-SMT"	backward error recovery	"End-to-End Arguments"
Sep 29	FT microprocessors, "RAS Strategy for IBM S/390"	"Argus"	review for midterm
Oct 6	MIDTERM EXAM	"SWIFT"	FT memory and disks
Oct 13	FALL BREAK	FT networks	FT software, "Proactive Management of Software Aging"
Oct 20	FT software, "Software Implemented Fault Tolerance"	FT software, "The Google Cluster Architecture"	modeling/evaluation, "Modeling the Effect of Technology Trends"
Oct 27	modeling/evaluation	modeling/evaluation, "The Impact of Technology Scaling on Lifetime Reliability"	modeling/evaluation
Nov 3	modeling/evaluation	testing	testing
Nov 10	testing	design for test	"Validating the Pentium 4 Microprocessor"
Nov 17	"I_DDQ Test"	review for final	PROJECT PRESENTATIONS
Nov 24	PROJECT PRESENTATIONS	THANKSGIVING
Dec 1	READING PERIOD