Guiding fault-driven adaption in multicore systems through a reliability-aware static task schedule

Future multicore systems suffer from high and varying fault rates due to device scaling, increasing number of processing notes, varying environmental issues and aging effects. Efficient fault tolerant solutions capable of combining the advantages of static optimization and runtime adaptation are needed. To achieve this goal, we propose a static reliability-aware scheduling technique, aiming to guide runtime adaptation and relieve most of the computational overhead. The proposed static scheduler considers “reliability level” (RL) as an intermediate scheduling dimension and creates a “task-to-RL-to-core” mapping. This enables the “RL-to-core” mapping to be efficiently adapted at runtime according to fault rate variations, while the “task-to-RL” mapping can still be reused. Experimental studies show that by considering fault rates during static scheduling, runtime application execution time can be improved by up to 19% in a non-constant fault rate environment.