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

High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) Middleware Update

High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) is a joint project between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to develop a high-performance multi-core radiation hardened flight processor. HPSC offers a new flight computing architecture to meet the needs of NASA missions through 2030 and beyond. Providing on the order of 100X the computational capacity of current flight processors for the same amount of power, the multicore architecture of the HPSC processor, or "Chiplet" provides unprecedented flexibility in a flight computing system by enabling the operating point to be set dynamically, trading among needs for computational performance, energy management and fault tolerance. The HPSC Chiplet is being developed by Boeing under contract to NASA, and is expected to provide prototypes, an evaluation board, system emulators, comprehensive system software, and a software development kit. In addition to the vendor deliverables, the AFRL is funding the development of a flexible Middleware to be developed by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The HPSC Middleware provides a suite of thirteen high level services to manage the compute, memory and I/O resources of this complex device.This presentation will provide an HPSC project update, an overview of the latest HPSC System Software release, an overview of HPSC Middleware Release 2, and a preview of the third HPSC Middleware release. The presentation will begin with a project update that will provide a look at the high-level changes since the project was introduced at the Flight Software Workshop last year. Next, the presentation will provide an overview of the current suite of HPSC System Software which includes the vendor provided bootloaders, operating systems, emulator, and development tools. Next, the HPSC Middleware progress will be presented, which includes an overview of the features and capabilities of HPSC Middleware Release 2, followed by a look at the reference flight software applications which utilize the Middleware. Finally, the presentation will give a preview of the HPSC Middleware Release 3

병렬 및 분산 임베디드 시스템을 위한 모델 기반 코드 생성 프레임워크

학위논문(박사)--서울대학교 대학원 :공과대학 컴퓨터공학부,2020. 2. 하순회.소프트웨어 설계 생산성 및 유지보수성을 향상시키기 위해 다양한 소프트웨어 개발 방법론이 제안되었지만, 대부분의 연구는 응용 소프트웨어를 하나의 프로세서에서 동작시키는 데에 초점을 맞추고 있다. 또한, 임베디드 시스템을 개발하는 데에 필요한 지연이나 자원 요구 사항에 대한 비기능적 요구 사항을 고려하지 않고 있기 때문에 일반적인 소프트웨어 개발 방법론을 임베디드 소프트웨어를 개발하는 데에 적용하는 것은 적합하지 않다. 이 논문에서는 병렬 및 분산 임베디드 시스템을 대상으로 하는 소프트웨어를 모델로 표현하고, 이를 소프트웨어 분석이나 개발에 활용하는 개발 방법론을 소개한다. 우리의 모델에서 응용 소프트웨어는 계층적으로 표현할 수 있는 여러 개의 태스크로 이루어져 있으며, 하드웨어 플랫폼과 독립적으로 명세한다. 태스크 간의 통신 및 동기화는 모델이 정의한 규약이 정해져 있고, 이러한 규약을 통해 실제 프로그램을 실행하기 전에 소프트웨어 에러를 정적 분석을 통해 확인할 수 있고, 이는 응용의 검증 복잡도를 줄이는 데에 기여한다. 지정한 하드웨어 플랫폼에서 동작하는 프로그램은 태스크들을 프로세서에 매핑한 이후에 자동적으로 합성할 수 있다. 위의 모델 기반 소프트웨어 개발 방법론에서 사용하는 프로그램 합성기를 본 논문에서 제안하였는데, 명세한 플랫폼 요구 사항을 바탕으로 병렬 및 분산 임베디드 시스템을에서 동작하는 코드를 생성한다. 여러 개의 정형적 모델들을 계층적으로 표현하여 응용의 동적 행태를 나타고, 합성기는 여러 모델로 구성된 계층적인 모델로부터 병렬성을 고려하여 태스크를 실행할 수 있다. 또한, 프로그램 합성기에서 다양한 플랫폼이나 네트워크를 지원할 수 있도록 코드를 관리하는 방법도 보여주고 있다. 본 논문에서 제시하는 소프트웨어 개발 방법론은 6개의 하드웨어 플랫폼과 3 종류의 네트워크로 구성되어 있는 실제 감시 소프트웨어 시스템 응용 예제와 이종 멀티 프로세서를 활용하는 원격 딥 러닝 예제를 수행하여 개발 방법론의 적용 가능성을 시험하였다. 또한, 프로그램 합성기가 새로운 플랫폼이나 네트워크를 지원하기 위해 필요로 하는 개발 비용도 실제 측정 및 예측하여 상대적으로 적은 노력으로 새로운 플랫폼을 지원할 수 있음을 확인하였다. 많은 임베디드 시스템에서 예상치 못한 하드웨어 에러에 대해 결함을 감내하는 것을 필요로 하기 때문에 결함 감내에 대한 코드를 자동으로 생성하는 연구도 진행하였다. 본 기법에서 결함 감내 설정에 따라 태스크 그래프를 수정하는 방식을 활용하였으며, 결함 감내의 비기능적 요구 사항을 응용 개발자가 쉽게 적용할 수 있도록 하였다. 또한, 결함 감내 지원하는 것과 관련하여 실제 수동으로 구현했을 경우와 비교하였고, 결함 주입 도구를 이용하여 결함 발생 시나리오를 재현하거나, 임의로 결함을 주입하는 실험을 수행하였다. 마지막으로 결함 감내를 실험할 때에 활용한 결함 주입 도구는 본 논문의 또 다른 기여 사항 중 하나로 리눅스 환경으로 대상으로 응용 영역 및 커널 영역에 결함을 주입하는 도구를 개발하였다. 시스템의 견고성을 검증하기 위해 결함을 주입하여 결함 시나리오를 재현하는 것은 널리 사용되는 방법으로, 본 논문에서 개발된 결함 주입 도구는 시스템이 동작하는 도중에 재현 가능한 결함을 주입할 수 있는 도구이다. 커널 영역에서의 결함 주입을 위해 두 종류의 결함 주입 방법을 제공하며, 하나는 커널 GNU 디버거를 이용한 방법이고, 다른 하나는 ARM 하드웨어 브레이크포인트를 활용한 방법이다. 응용 영역에서 결함을 주입하기 위해 GDB 기반 결함 주입 방법을 이용하여 동일 시스템 혹은 원격 시스템의 응용에 결함을 주입할 수 있다. 결함 주입 도구에 대한 실험은 ODROID-XU4 보드에서 진행하였다.While various software development methodologies have been proposed to increase the design productivity and maintainability of software, they usually focus on the development of application software running on a single processing element, without concern about the non-functional requirements of an embedded system such as latency and resource requirements. In this thesis, we present a model-based software development method for parallel and distributed embedded systems. An application is specified as a set of tasks that follow a set of given rules for communication and synchronization in a hierarchical fashion, independently of the hardware platform. Having such rules enables us to perform static analysis to check some software errors at compile time to reduce the verification difficulty. Platform-specific program is synthesized automatically after mapping of tasks onto processing elements is determined. The program synthesizer is also proposed to generate codes which satisfies platform requirements for parallel and distributed embedded systems. As multiple models which can express dynamic behaviors can be depicted hierarchically, the synthesizer supports to manage multiple task graphs with a different hierarchy to run tasks with parallelism. Also, the synthesizer shows methods of managing codes for heterogeneous platforms and generating various communication methods. The viability of the proposed software development method is verified with a real-life surveillance application that runs on six processing elements with three remote communication methods, and remote deep learning example is conducted to use heterogeneous multiprocessing components on distributed systems. Also, supporting a new platform and network requires a small effort by measuring and estimating development costs. Since tolerance to unexpected errors is a required feature of many embedded systems, we also support an automatic fault-tolerant code generation. Fault tolerance can be applied by modifying the task graph based on the selected fault tolerance configurations, so the non-functional requirement of fault tolerance can be easily adopted by an application developer. To compare the effort of supporting fault tolerance, manual implementation of fault tolerance is performed. Also, the fault tolerance method is tested with the fault injection tool to emulate fault scenarios and inject faults randomly. Our fault injection tool, which has used for testing our fault-tolerance method, is another work of this thesis. Emulating fault scenarios by intentionally injecting faults is commonly used to test and verify the robustness of a system. To emulate faults on an embedded system, we present a run-time fault injection framework that can inject a fault on both a kernel and application layer of Linux-based systems. For injecting faults on a kernel layer, two complementary fault injection techniques are used. One is based on Kernel GNU Debugger, and the other is using a hardware breakpoint supported by the ARM architecture. For application-level fault injection, the GDB-based fault injection method is used to inject a fault on a remote application. The viability of the proposed fault injection tool is proved by real-life experiments with an ODROID-XU4 system.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Contribution 6 1.3 Dissertation Organization 8 Chapter 2 Background 9 2.1 HOPES: Hope of Parallel Embedded Software 9 2.1.1 Software Development Procedure 9 2.1.2 Components of HOPES 12 2.2 Universal Execution Model 13 2.2.1 Task Graph Specification 13 2.2.2 Dataflow specification of an Application 15 2.2.3 Task Code Specification and Generic APIs 21 2.2.4 Meta-data Specification 23 Chapter 3 Program Synthesis for Parallel and Distributed Embedded Systems 24 3.1 Motivational Example 24 3.2 Program Synthesis Overview 26 3.3 Program Synthesis from Hierarchically-mixed Models 30 3.4 Platform Code Synthesis 33 3.5 Communication Code Synthesis 36 3.6 Experiments 40 3.6.1 Development Cost of Supporting New Platforms and Networks 40 3.6.2 Program Synthesis for the Surveillance System Example 44 3.6.3 Remote GPU-accelerated Deep Learning Example 46 3.7 Document Generation 48 3.8 Related Works 49 Chapter 4 Model Transformation for Fault-tolerant Code Synthesis 56 4.1 Fault-tolerant Code Synthesis Techniques 56 4.2 Applying Fault Tolerance Techniques in HOPES 61 4.3 Experiments 62 4.3.1 Development Cost of Applying Fault Tolerance 62 4.3.2 Fault Tolerance Experiments 62 4.4 Random Fault Injection Experiments 65 4.5 Related Works 68 Chapter 5 Fault Injection Framework for Linux-based Embedded Systems 70 5.1 Background 70 5.1.1 Fault Injection Techniques 70 5.1.2 Kernel GNU Debugger 71 5.1.3 ARM Hardware Breakpoint 72 5.2 Fault Injection Framework 74 5.2.1 Overview 74 5.2.2 Architecture 75 5.2.3 Fault Injection Techniques 79 5.2.4 Implementation 83 5.3 Experiments 90 5.3.1 Experiment Setup 90 5.3.2 Performance Comparison of Two Fault Injection Methods 90 5.3.3 Bit-flip Fault Experiments 92 5.3.4 eMMC Controller Fault Experiments 94 Chapter 6 Conclusion 97 Bibliography 99 요 약 108Docto

Towards a methodology for rigorous development of generic requirements patterns

We present work in progress on a methodology for the engineering, validation and verification of generic requirements using domain engineering and formal methods. The need to develop a generic requirement set for subsequent system instantiation is complicated by the addition of the high levels of verification demanded by safety-critical domains such as avionics. We consider the failure detection and management function for engine control systems as an application domain where product line engineering is useful. The methodology produces a generic requirement set in our, UML based, formal notation, UML-B. The formal verification both of the generic requirement set, and of a particular application, is achieved via translation to the formal specification language, B, using our U2B and ProB tools

Fault-Tolerance by Graceful Degradation for Car Platoons

The key advantage of autonomous car platoons are their short inter-vehicle distances that increase traffic flow and reduce fuel consumption. However, this is challenging for operational and functional safety. If a failure occurs, the affected vehicles cannot suddenly stop driving but instead should continue their operation with reduced performance until a safe state can be reached or, in the case of temporal failures, full functionality can be guaranteed again. To achieve this degradation, platoon members have to be able to compensate sensor and communication failures and have to adjust their inter-vehicle distances to ensure safety. In this work, we describe a systematic design of degradation cascades for sensor and communication failures in autonomous car platoons using the example of an autonomous model car. We describe our systematic design method, the resulting degradation modes, and formulate contracts for each degradation level. We model and test our resulting degradation controller in Simulink/Stateflow

Safety verification of ADA programs in MURPHY

MURPHY is a experimental methodology, which will include an integrated tool set, for building safety-critical, real-time software. Although it is language independent, many safety-critical software projects are currently planning to use Ada. This paper presents the semantic templates for the verification of the safety of Ada programs using Software Fault Tree Analysis. An example is shown of applying the technique to an Ada program, and the tools in the MURPHY tool set to aid in this type of analysis are described