TY - GEN

T1 - Checkpoint Placement for Systematic Fault-Injection Campaigns

AU - Dietrich, Christian

AU - Thomas, Tim Marek

AU - Mnich, Matthias

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2023 IEEE.

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - Shrinking hardware structures and decreasing operating voltages lead to an increasing number of transient hardware faults, which thus become a core problem to consider for safety-critical systems. Here, systematic fault injection (FI), where one program-under-test is systematically stressed with faults, provides an in-depth resilience analysis in the presence of faults. However, FI campaigns require many independent injection experiments and, combined, long run times, especially if we aim for a high coverage of the fault space. One cost factor is the forwarding phase, which is the time required to bring the system-under test into the fault-free state at injection time. One common technique to speed up the forwarding are checkpoints of the fault-free system state at fixed points in time. In this paper, we show that the placement of checkpoints has a significant influence on the required forwarding cycles, especially if we place faults non-uniformly on the time axis. For this, we discuss the checkpoint-selection problem in general, formalize it as a maximum-weight reward path problem in graphs, propose an ILP formulation and a dynamic programming algorithm that find the optimal solution, and provide a heuristic checkpoint-selection method based on a genetic algorithm. Applied to the MiBench benchmark suite, our approach consistently reduces the forward-phase cycles by at least 88 percent and up to 99.934 percent when placing 16 checkpoints.

AB - Shrinking hardware structures and decreasing operating voltages lead to an increasing number of transient hardware faults, which thus become a core problem to consider for safety-critical systems. Here, systematic fault injection (FI), where one program-under-test is systematically stressed with faults, provides an in-depth resilience analysis in the presence of faults. However, FI campaigns require many independent injection experiments and, combined, long run times, especially if we aim for a high coverage of the fault space. One cost factor is the forwarding phase, which is the time required to bring the system-under test into the fault-free state at injection time. One common technique to speed up the forwarding are checkpoints of the fault-free system state at fixed points in time. In this paper, we show that the placement of checkpoints has a significant influence on the required forwarding cycles, especially if we place faults non-uniformly on the time axis. For this, we discuss the checkpoint-selection problem in general, formalize it as a maximum-weight reward path problem in graphs, propose an ILP formulation and a dynamic programming algorithm that find the optimal solution, and provide a heuristic checkpoint-selection method based on a genetic algorithm. Applied to the MiBench benchmark suite, our approach consistently reduces the forward-phase cycles by at least 88 percent and up to 99.934 percent when placing 16 checkpoints.

KW - Checkpoint Placement

KW - Fault Injection

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85181397790&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.48550/arXiv.2308.05521

DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2308.05521

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85181397790

SN - 979-8-3503-2226-2

T3 - IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, Digest of Technical Papers, ICCAD

BT - 2023 42nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD 2023 - Proceedings

PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

T2 - 42nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD 2023

Y2 - 28 October 2023 through 2 November 2023

ER -