Title: Enhancing the performance of process level redundancy with coprocessors in symmetric multiprocessors

Authors: Tong Zhang; Hongjun Dai; Changsong Wu; Zhiping Jia

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Box 94, No. 1500, Shunhua Road, Jinan, Shandong, China ' Department of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Box 94, No. 1500, Shunhua Road, Jinan, Shandong, China ' Department of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Box 94, No. 1500, Shunhua Road, Jinan, Shandong, China ' Department of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Box 94, No. 1500, Shunhua Road, Jinan, Shandong, China

Abstract: Transient faults are rising as a crucial concern in the reliability of computer systems. As the emerging trend of integrating coprocessors into symmetric multiprocessors, it offers a better choice for software-oriented fault tolerance approaches. This paper presents coprocessor-based process level redundancy (PLR) which makes use of coprocessors and frees CPU cycle to other tasks. The experiment is conducted by comparing the performance of one CPU version of PLR and one coprocessor version PLR using a subset of optimised SPEC CPU2006 benchmark. It shows that the proposed approach enhances performance by 32.6% on average. The performance can be enhanced more if one application contains more system calls. This common technique can be adapted to other software-based fault tolerance as well.

Keywords: fault tolerance; symmetric multiprocessors; SMPs; process-level redundancy; coprocessor.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2018.089572

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2018 Vol.16 No.1, pp.1 - 8

Received: 07 Oct 2013
Accepted: 02 Nov 2013

Published online: 31 Jan 2018 *

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