ECE 254 / CPS 225 - Fault-Tolerant and Testable Computing Systems

ECE 254 / CPS 225

Fault-Tolerant and Testable Computing Systems

Fall 2006

Professor Daniel J. Sorin

Course Objective and Content

Objective: To provide students with an understanding of fault tolerant computers, including both the theory of how to design and evaluate them and the practical knowledge of real fault tolerant systems.

Content: The main themes of this course are: technological reasons for faults, fault models, information redundancy, spatial redundancy, backward and forward error recovery, fault-tolerant hardware and software, modeling and analysis, testing, and design for test.

The course includes a project that will allow the students to apply what they have learned in class.

Prerequisites: ECE 152 or CPS 104 or consent of instructor.

Class Location and Hours

Class meets M/W/F from 10:20am - 11:10am.

Location: 201 Hudson Hall

Instructor

Professor Daniel J. Sorin

Office: 209C Hudson Hall

Office Hours: Monday 2:00-3:00, Wednesday 11:10 (after class) -12:00

Email: Email Address of Daniel Sorin

Textbook

There is no textbook for this course. If you still think you'd like one, let me know and I can recommend one.

Assignments and Grading

Students are responsible for:

homework (due at beginning of class on specified day) - 35% of grade
midterm exam - 20% of grade (example: fall 2004 midterm)
final exam - 25% of grade
individual or group project (due at beginning of class on specified day) - 20% of grade

The project is a significant assignment that requires:

written proposal (no more than 2 pages), due Oct 16
written progress report (no more than 3 pages), due Nov 6
final document (no more than 10 pages), due Nov 27
final presentations (in class), Nov 27-Dec 1

Deadlines will be enforced except under extreme circumstances. I would prefer that you turn in something not quite done on the due date rather

than waiting until after the deadline to try to finish it. Each day late will result in a 10% reduction of the grade given.

Academic Misconduct: I will not tolerate academically dishonest work. This includes cheating on the homework and exams and plagiarism on the project.

Be careful on the project to cite prior work and to give proper credit to others' work.

Course Topics, Lecture Notes, and Readings

I will post lecture notes (in PowerPoint format) the night before I cover them in class. Feel free to print them out and bring them to class with you.

Topic	Readings
Introduction: Terminology and Metrics
Faults and Their Causes	"IBM Experiments in Soft Fails in Computer Electronics" (Ziegler), "A Large-Scale Study of Failures in High-Performance Computing Systems" (Schroeder and Gibson), "Why Do Internet Services Fail, and What Can be Done About It?" (Oppenheimer et al.)
General Fault Tolerance Concepts - Physical redundancy - Error detecting/correcting codes - Re-execution techniques - Backward error recovery	"The Teramac Custom Computer: Extending the Limits with Defect Tolerance" (Culbertson et al.), "AR-SMT: A Microarchitectural Approach to Fault Tolerance in Microprocessors" (Rotenberg), "A Survey of Rollback-Recovery Protocols in Message-Passing Systems" (Elnozahy et al.)
Real Systems: Fault Tolerant Hardware	"RAS Strategy for IBM S/390 G5 and G6" (Mueller et al.), "A White Paper on the Benefits of Chipkill-Correct ECC for PC Server Main Memory" (Dell), "End-to-End Arguments in System Design (Saltzer et al.)
Real Systems: Fault Tolerant Software	"Proactive Management of Software Aging" (Castelli et al.), "Software Implemented Fault Tolerance: Technologies and Experience" (Huang and Kintala), "Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture" (Barroso et al.),
Modeling and Evaluation	"Modeling the Effect of Technology Trends on the Soft Error Rate of Combinational Logic" (Shivakumar et al.), "The Impact of Technology Scaling on Lifetime Reliability" (Srinivasan et al.)
Testing, Design for Test, and Verification	"Validating the Pentium 4 Microprocessor" (Bentley and Gray) "I_DDQ Test: Will It Survive the DSM Challenge?" (Sabade and Walker)

Homework Assignments

Homework #1, Due Friday, Sept 15 in class

Homework #2, Due Monday, Sept 25 in class (Exercise 3.2 must be emailed to me by 10:00am on Sept 25)

Homework #3, Due Monday, Oct 30 in class (Exercise 6.4 must be emailed to me by 10:00am on Oct 30)

Homework #4, Due Monday, Nov 20 in class

Tentative Schedule (subject to change)

Week	Monday	Wednesday	Friday
Aug 28	introduction	faults and their causes	faults and their causes
Sep 4	"IBM Experiment in Soft Fails"	"A Large-Scale Study of Failures"	"Why Do Internet Services Fail?"
Sep 11	basic FT concepts	physical redundancy	"The Teramac"
Sep 18	information redundancy	re-execution techniques	"AR-SMT"
Sep 25	backward error recovery	"A Survey of Rollback-Recovery Protocols"	review for midterm
Oct 2	MIDTERM EXAM	FT microprocessors, "RAS Strategy for IBM S/390"	FT memory, "Chipkill Memory"
Oct 9	FALL BREAK	FT disks	FT networks, "End-to-End Arguments"
Oct 16	FT multiprocessors project proposals due	FT software, "Proactive Management of Software Aging"	FT software, "Software Implemented Fault Tolerance"
Oct 23	FT software, "The Google Cluster Architecture"	modeling/evaluation, "Modeling the Effect of Technology Trends"	modeling/evaluation
Oct 30	modeling/evaluation, "The Impact of Technology Scaling on Lifetime Reliability"	modeling/evaluation	modeling/evaluation
Nov 6	testing project progress reports due	testing	testing
Nov 13	design for test	"Validating the Pentium 4 Microprocessor"	"I_DDQ Test"
Nov 20	review for final	THANKSGIVING
Nov 27	PROJECT PRESENTATIONS [PROJECTS DUE NOV 27]