DeSyRe: on-Demand System Reliability

The DeSyRe project builds on-demand adaptive and reliable Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). As fabrication technology scales down, chips are becoming less reliable, thereby incurring increased power and performance costs for fault tolerance. To make matters worse, power density is becoming a significant limiting factor in SoC design, in general. In the face of such changes in the technological landscape, current solutions for fault tolerance are expected to introduce excessive overheads in future systems. Moreover, attempting to design and manufacture a totally defect and fault-free system, would impact heavily, even prohibitively, the design, manufacturing, and testing costs, as well as the system performance and power consumption. In this context, DeSyRe delivers a new generation of systems that are reliable by design at well-balanced power, performance, and design costs. In our attempt to reduce the overheads of fault-tolerance, only a small fraction of the chip is built to be fault-free. This fault-free part is then employed to manage the remaining fault-prone resources of the SoC. The DeSyRe framework is applied to two medical systems with high safety requirements (measured using the IEC 61508 functional safety standard) and tight power and performance constraints

Gendering dynamic capabilities in micro firms

Gender issues are well-researched in the general management literature, particular in studies on new ventures. Unfortunately, gender issues have been largely ignored in the dynamic capabilities literature. We address this gap by analyzing the effects of gender diversity on dynamic capabilities among micro firms. We consider the gender of managers and personnel in 124 Ukrainian tourism micro firms. We examine how a manager’s gender affects the firm’s sensing capacities and investigate how it moderates team gender diversity’s impact on sensing capacities. We also investigate how personnel composition impacts seizing and reconfiguration capacities. We find that female managers have several shortcomings concerning a firm’s sensing capacity but that personnel gender diversity increases this capacity. Team gender diversity has positive effects on a firm’s seizing and reconfiguration abilities. Our study advances research on gender diversity and its impact on firm capabilities and illustrates its relevance for staffing practices in micro firms

Efficient algorithms for reconfiguration in VLSI/WSI arrays

The issue of developing efficient algorithms for reconfiguring processor arrays in the presence of faulty processors and fixed hardware resources is discussed. The models discussed consist of a set of identical processors embedded in a flexible interconnection structure that is configured in the form of a rectangular grid. An array grid model based on single-track switches is considered. An efficient polynomial time algorithm is proposed for determining feasible reconfigurations for an array with a given distribution of faulty processors. In the process, it is shown that the set of conditions in the reconfigurability theorem is not necessary. A polynomial time algorithm is developed for finding feasible reconfigurations in an augmented single-track model and in array grid models with multiple-track switche

The Performability Manager

The authors describe the performability manager, a distributed system component that contributes to a more effective and efficient use of system components and prevents quality of service (QoS) degradation. The performability manager dynamically reconfigures distributed systems whenever needed, to recover from failures and to permit the system to evolve over time and include new functionality. Large systems require dynamic reconfiguration to support dynamic change without shutting down the complete system. A distributed system monitor is needed to verify QoS. Monitoring a distributed system is difficult because of synchronization problems and minor differences in clock speeds. The authors describe the functionality and the operation of the performability manager (both informally and formally). Throughout the paper they illustrate the approach by an example distributed application: an ANSAware-based number translation service (NTS), from the intelligent networks (IN) area