20,652 research outputs found
Integrated assurance assessment of a reconfigurable digital flight control system
The integrated application of reliability, failure effects and system simulator methods in establishing the airworthiness of a flight critical digital flight control system (DFCS) is demonstrated. The emphasis was on the mutual reinforcement of the methods in demonstrating the system safety
Enabling electronic prognostics using thermal data
Prognostics is a process of assessing the extent of deviation or degradation
of a product from its expected normal operating condition, and then, based on
continuous monitoring, predicting the future reliability of the product. By
being able to determine when a product will fail, procedures can be developed
to provide advanced warning of failures, optimize maintenance, reduce life
cycle costs, and improve the design, qualification and logistical support of
fielded and future systems. In the case of electronics, the reliability is
often influenced by thermal loads, in the form of steady-state temperatures,
power cycles, temperature gradients, ramp rates, and dwell times. If one can
continuously monitor the thermal loads, in-situ, this data can be used in
conjunction with precursor reasoning algorithms and stress-and-damage models to
enable prognostics. This paper discusses approaches to enable electronic
prognostics and provides a case study of prognostics using thermal data.Comment: Submitted on behalf of TIMA Editions
(http://irevues.inist.fr/tima-editions
Fault Tolerant Electronic System Design
Due to technology scaling, which means reduced transistor size, higher density, lower voltage and more aggressive clock frequency, VLSI devices may become more sensitive against soft errors. Especially for those devices used in safety- and mission-critical applications, dependability and reliability are becoming increasingly important constraints during the development of system on/around them. Other phenomena (e.g., aging and wear-out effects) also have negative impacts on reliability of modern circuits. Recent researches show that even at sea level, radiation particles can still induce soft errors in electronic systems.
On one hand, processor-based system are commonly used in a wide variety of applications, including safety-critical and high availability missions, e.g., in the automotive, biomedical and aerospace domains. In these fields, an error may produce catastrophic consequences. Thus, dependability is a primary target that must be achieved taking into account tight constraints in terms of cost, performance, power and time to market. With standards and regulations (e.g., ISO-26262, DO-254, IEC-61508) clearly specify the targets to be achieved and the methods to prove their achievement, techniques working at system level are particularly attracting.
On the other hand, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices are becoming more and more attractive, also in safety- and mission-critical applications due to the high performance, low power consumption and the flexibility for reconfiguration they provide. Two types of FPGAs are commonly used, based on their configuration memory cell technology, i.e., SRAM-based and Flash-based FPGA. For SRAM-based FPGAs, the SRAM cells of the configuration memory highly susceptible to radiation induced effects which can leads to system failure; and for Flash-based FPGAs, even though their non-volatile configuration memory cells are almost immune to Single Event Upsets induced by energetic particles, the floating gate switches and the logic cells in the configuration tiles can still suffer from Single Event Effects when hit by an highly charged particle. So analysis and mitigation techniques for Single Event Effects on FPGAs are becoming increasingly important in the design flow especially when reliability is one of the main requirements
Airborne Advanced Reconfigurable Computer System (ARCS)
A digital computer subsystem fault-tolerant concept was defined, and the potential benefits and costs of such a subsystem were assessed when used as the central element of a new transport's flight control system. The derived advanced reconfigurable computer system (ARCS) is a triple-redundant computer subsystem that automatically reconfigures, under multiple fault conditions, from triplex to duplex to simplex operation, with redundancy recovery if the fault condition is transient. The study included criteria development covering factors at the aircraft's operation level that would influence the design of a fault-tolerant system for commercial airline use. A new reliability analysis tool was developed for evaluating redundant, fault-tolerant system availability and survivability; and a stringent digital system software design methodology was used to achieve design/implementation visibility
Predicting Scheduling Failures in the Cloud
Cloud Computing has emerged as a key technology to deliver and manage
computing, platform, and software services over the Internet. Task scheduling
algorithms play an important role in the efficiency of cloud computing services
as they aim to reduce the turnaround time of tasks and improve resource
utilization. Several task scheduling algorithms have been proposed in the
literature for cloud computing systems, the majority relying on the
computational complexity of tasks and the distribution of resources. However,
several tasks scheduled following these algorithms still fail because of
unforeseen changes in the cloud environments. In this paper, using tasks
execution and resource utilization data extracted from the execution traces of
real world applications at Google, we explore the possibility of predicting the
scheduling outcome of a task using statistical models. If we can successfully
predict tasks failures, we may be able to reduce the execution time of jobs by
rescheduling failed tasks earlier (i.e., before their actual failing time). Our
results show that statistical models can predict task failures with a precision
up to 97.4%, and a recall up to 96.2%. We simulate the potential benefits of
such predictions using the tool kit GloudSim and found that they can improve
the number of finished tasks by up to 40%. We also perform a case study using
the Hadoop framework of Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) and the jobs of a gene
expression correlations analysis study from breast cancer research. We find
that when extending the scheduler of Hadoop with our predictive models, the
percentage of failed jobs can be reduced by up to 45%, with an overhead of less
than 5 minutes
Towards Data-Driven Autonomics in Data Centers
Continued reliance on human operators for managing data centers is a major
impediment for them from ever reaching extreme dimensions. Large computer
systems in general, and data centers in particular, will ultimately be managed
using predictive computational and executable models obtained through
data-science tools, and at that point, the intervention of humans will be
limited to setting high-level goals and policies rather than performing
low-level operations. Data-driven autonomics, where management and control are
based on holistic predictive models that are built and updated using generated
data, opens one possible path towards limiting the role of operators in data
centers. In this paper, we present a data-science study of a public Google
dataset collected in a 12K-node cluster with the goal of building and
evaluating a predictive model for node failures. We use BigQuery, the big data
SQL platform from the Google Cloud suite, to process massive amounts of data
and generate a rich feature set characterizing machine state over time. We
describe how an ensemble classifier can be built out of many Random Forest
classifiers each trained on these features, to predict if machines will fail in
a future 24-hour window. Our evaluation reveals that if we limit false positive
rates to 5%, we can achieve true positive rates between 27% and 88% with
precision varying between 50% and 72%. We discuss the practicality of including
our predictive model as the central component of a data-driven autonomic
manager and operating it on-line with live data streams (rather than off-line
on data logs). All of the scripts used for BigQuery and classification analyses
are publicly available from the authors' website.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure
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