Fault coverage

About: Fault coverage is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10153 publications have been published within this topic receiving 161933 citations. The topic is also known as: test coverage.

Method and architecture for automated fault diagnosis and correction in a computer system

Abstract: A method, apparatus, and computer program product diagnosing and resolving faults is disclosed. A disclosed fault management architecture includes a fault manager suitable having diagnostic engines and fault correction agents. The diagnostic engines receive error information and identify associated fault possibilities. The fault possibility information is passed to fault correction agents, which diagnose and resolve the associated faults. The architecture uses logs to track the status of error information, the status of fault management exercises, and the fault status of system resources. Additionally, a soft error rate discriminator can be employed to track and resolve soft (correctible) errors in the system. The architecture is extensible allowing additional diagnostic engines and agents to be plugged in to the architecture without interrupting the normal operational flow of the computer system.

Harnessing Soft Computations for Low-Budget Fault Tolerance

Abstract: A growing number of applications from various domains such as multimedia, machine learning and computer vision are inherently fault tolerant. However, for these soft workloads, not all computations are fault tolerant (e.g., a loop trip count). In this paper, we propose a compiler-based approach that takes advantage of soft computations inherent in the aforementioned class of workloads to bring down the cost of software-only transient fault detection. The technique works by identifying a small subset of critical variables that are necessary for correct macro-operation of the program. Traditional duplication and comparison are used to protect these variables. For the remaining variables and temporaries that only affect the micro-operation of the program, strategic expected value checks are inserted into the code. Intuitively, a computation-chain result near the expected value is either correct or close enough to the correct result so that it does not matter for non-critical variables. Overall, the proposed solution has, on average, only 19.5% performance overhead and reduces the number of silent data corruptions from 15% down to 7.3% and user-visible silent data corruptions from 3.4% down to 1.2% in comparison to an unmodified application. This unacceptable silent data corruption rate is even lower than a traditional full duplication scheme that has, on average, 57% overhead.

Hierarchical specification-driven analog fault modeling for efficient fault simulation and diagnosis

Abstract: In this paper we discuss the capabilities of the MiST PROFIT (Mixed Signal Test Program for Fault Insertion and Testing) software for hierarchical fault modeling, tolerance modeling, fault clustering and fault diagnosis of complex mixed-signal systems. The software is designed to exploit the relationships between high level system specifications and module-level faults in complex and nonlinear mixed signal systems. Hierarchical simulation based methods are used to capture fault effects at different levels of circuit abstraction. The key features of our approach are: (a) the ability to compute tolerance effects from nonlinear behavioral models at different levels of circuit design hierarchy accurately using low-cost simulation based methods, (b) the ability to perform compaction of fault effects while transferring fault effects from the leaf cells to the highest level behavioral models, (c) the ability to capture parametric (soft) failure effects over the entire anticipated range of faulty parameter values and (d) the ability to construct fault dictionaries given a set of least replaceable units to diagnose.