TERPS: The Embedded Reliable Processing System
TERPS: The Embedded Reliable Processing System
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Publication or External Link
Date
2005-01
Authors
Wang, Hongxia
Rodriguez, Samuel
Dirik, Cagdas
Gole, Amol
Chan, Vincent
Jacob, Bruce
Advisor
Citation
"TERPS: The Embedded Reliable Processing System." Hongxia Wang, Samuel Rodriguez, Cagdas Dirik, Amol Gole, Vincent Chan, and Bruce Jacob. A finalist in the University LSI Design Contest. Proc. Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference 2005 (ASP-DAC 2005), Shanghai China, January 2005.
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Abstract
TERPS is a fault-tolerant computer design that significantly reduces the threat of electromagnetic interference (EMI), using hardware checkpoint/rollback-recovery. TERPS tolerates EMI by periodically checkpointing processor state into a special safe-storage device. The detection of EMI invokes rollback, which recovers processor state from a previously check-pointed state and resumes normal execution. Rollback results in loss of
performance dictated by the EMI duration; TERPS ensures forward progress of the system provided EMI events are separated by some minimum time interval (e.g., at least 5.12μs for our prototype processor running at 100MHz). The performance overhead of our mechanism is reasonable: 5–6% overhead when checkpointing every 128 processor cycles.