On Preserving Data Integrity of Transactional Applications on Multicore Architectures

Abstract

Multicore architectures are increasingly becoming prone to transient faults. In this paper we briefly present Shield, a middleware to provide transactional applications with resiliency to those faults that can happen anytime during the execution of a processor but do not cause any hardware interruption. Shield is inspired by the state machine replication approach, where computational resources are partitioned, the shared state is fully replicated, and requests are executed by all partitions in the same order. Shield embeds a set of algorithmic and system innovations to limit the overhead with respect to non-fault-tolerant solutions. They include a fast total order layer that lets application threads and computational nodes co-operate in order to fast deliver.