CAREER: Horseshoes and Hand Grenades: Exploiting Error Tolerance in Applications

职业：马蹄铁和手榴弹：利用应用程序中的容错能力

• 批准号: 0855889
• 负责人: Diana Franklin
• 金额: $ 24.28万
• 依托单位: University of California-Santa Barbara
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-08-01 至 2012-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0855889&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Horseshoes; Hand; Grenades; Exploiting

The goal in most reliability projects has, traditionally, been to prevent errors of all kinds. Researchers are now discovering that not all errors cause a failure. Some errors can be masked within the circuits as not all inputs affect final results. By preventing all errors rather than only those errors that change a result, time and power get wasted. This project proposes to explore techniques which allow errors to occur that do not change final results. In many applications such as facial recognition or voice recognition, many of the data errors will not be noticed by the software, depending on the particular data. For example, if we one bit gets flipped in an incoming audio signal for voice recognition, it may not affect the result at all. The proper word may be recognized despite the error in one sample. A key observation, however, is that even these applications are not very resistant to control flow errors. For example, if the voice recognition software stops before it completes its analysis of the audio signal, the wrong word would most likely be recognized leading to failure. This project explores how to take advantage of partial tolerance to unreliability. More efficient reliability mechanisms can be designed that are targeted towards only the important instructions, not all instructions. In even more tolerant applications, errors can be introduced into the system in order to speed up the system--allowing the process to proceed without waiting for slow operations. In order to discover and exploit error-tolerance, this project will identify 10-15 applications that are tolerant to errors, develop heuristics to determine which instructions are more tolerant to error than others, develop specific techniques for efficiently protecting only critical instructions from errors, and develop mechanisms to introduce errors into less important, high-latency instructions in order to save power and/or improve performance.

传统上，大多数可靠性项目的目标是防止各种错误。 研究人员现在发现，并非所有错误都会导致失败。可以在电路中掩盖一些错误，因为并非所有输入都会影响最终结果。 通过防止所有错误，而不仅仅是改变结果的错误，时间和力量就会浪费。 该项目建议探索允许发生错误的技术，而不会改变最终结果。在许多应用程序（例如面部识别或语音识别）中，软件不会注意到许多数据错误，具体取决于特定数据。例如，如果我们在传入的音频信号中翻转以供语音识别，则可能根本不会影响结果。尽管一个样本错误，但可以识别正确的单词。但是，一个关键的观察结果是，即使这些应用也不是对控制流误差的抗药性。例如，如果语音识别软件在完成对音频信号的分析之前停止，那么错误的单词很可能会被识别导致故障。该项目探讨了如何利用对不可靠性的部分容忍度。 可以设计更有效的可靠性机制，仅针对重要说明，而不是所有指令。在更宽容的应用程序中，可以将错误引入系统以加快系统的速度 - 允许在不等待缓慢操作的情况下进行过程。 为了发现和利用容忍度的耐受性，该项目将确定耐受错误的10-15个应用程序，开发启发式方法，以确定哪些指令比其他说明更容忍错误，开发特定的技术，以有效地保护关键指令从错误中保护错误，并将错误的机制介绍为较少的重要，高标准的指导，以节省和/提高性能和/提高性能和/或提高//或提高//或提高//或提高//或提高///或提高//或提高///或提高///或提高///或提高//或提高///或改善。