The DeSyRe Runtime support for Fault-tolerant Embedded MPSoCs

Semiconductor technology scaling makes chips more sensitive to faults. This paper describes the DeSyRe design approach and its runtime management for future reliable embedded Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs). A lightweight runtime system is described for shared-memory MPSoCs to support fault-tolerant execution upon detection of transient and permanent faults. The DeSyRe runtime system offers reexecution of tasks that suffer from transient faults and taskmigration in cases where a worker processor is permanently faulty. In addition, a faulty worker can potentially remain usable, increasing systems fault-tolerance. This is achieved using alternative task implementations, which avoid the faulty circuit and are indicated in the application-code via pragma annotations, as well as by repairing a faulty core via hardware reconfiguration. Thereby, the system can be dynamically adapted using one or multiple of the above mechanisms to mitigate faults. The DeSyRe runtime system is evaluated using micro-benchmarks running on a Virtex-6 FPGA MPSoC. Results suggest that our enhanced fault-tolerant runtime system can successfully and efficiently execute all application tasks under a variety of fault cases.