Software Approaches for In-time Resilience

Abstract

Advances in semiconductor technology have enabled unprecedented growth in safety-critical applications. However, due to unabated scaling, the unreliability of the underlying hardware is only getting worse. For a lot of applications, just recovering from errors is not enough -- the latency between the occurrence of the fault to it's detection and recovery from the fault, i.e., in-time error resilience is of vital importance. This is especially true for real-time applications, where the timing of application events is a crucial part of the correctness of application. While software techniques for resilience are highly desirable since they can be flexibly applied, but achieving reliable, in-time software resilience is still an elusive goal. A new class of recent techniques have started to tackle this problem. This paper presents a succinct overview of existing software resilience techniques from the point-of-view of in-time resilience, and points out future challenges.