Current design processes are based on top down methodologies, using hardware description languages as the input of the design flow. This trend motivates changes in the test generation and fault simulation processes in order to establish an efficient method to evaluate test strategies at high abstraction levels. To make this possible it is necessary to adopt a fault model compatible with the cir...

0141-9331/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.micpro.2010.10.002 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +351 228340500; fax E-mail addresses: [email protected] (A.V. Fidalgo), mg [email protected] (G.R. Alves), [email protected] (J.M. Ferreir The rapid increase in the use of microprocessor-based systems in critical areas, where failures imply risks to human lives, to the environment or to expen...

Currently, in most fault simulators physical defects have to be modeled as stuck-at faults in networks of primitive gates such as AND, NAND, etc. On the other hand, the inadequacy of the stuck-at fault model for today's technologies has been pointed out by many authors. In this paper, a compiler driven fault simulator is presented which handles arbitrary combinational faults. The set of basic c...

While graphics processing units (GPUs) have gained wide adoption as accelerators for general-purpose applications (GPGPU), the end-to-end reliability implications of their use have not been quantified. Fault injection is a widely used method for evaluating the reliability of applications. However, building a fault injector for GPGPU applications is challenging due to their massive parallelism, ...

Ensuring that a distributed system meets its prescribed specification is a growing challenge that confronts software developers and system engineers. Meeting this challenge is particularly important for applications with strict dependability and/or timeliness constraints. We have developed a software fault injection tool, called ORCHESTRA, for testing dependability and timing properties of dist...

This paper introduces FITIn, a new fault-injection tool that supports instrumentation-based injections that are guided by annotations of the source code; FITIn allows for highly selective fault-injection tests. FITIn is implemented on top of the Valgrind framework. We present the major design decisions of FITIn and evaluate it using the Dhrystone benchmark.

This work presents a campaign of fault injection to validate the dependability of a fault tolerant microcomputer system. The system is duplex with cold stand-by sparing, parity detection and a watchdog timer. The faults have been injected on a chip-level VHDL model, using an injection tool designed with this purpose. We have carried out a set of injection experiments (with 3000 injections each)...

Ensuring that a distributed real-time system with strict dependability constraints meets its prescribed speciication is a growing challenge that confronts software developers and system engineers. This paper reports on a software fault injection tool, called SockPFI, for testing the fault tolerance and timing behavior of distributed real-time applications. SockPFI, developed on Real-Time Mach, ...

Software reliability for business applications is becoming a topic of interest in the IT community. An effective method to validate and understand defect behaviour in a software application is Fault Injection. Fault injection involves the deliberate insertion of faults or errors into software in order to determine its response and to study its behaviour. Fault Injection Modeling has demonstrate...

Software faults are recognized as the major cause of system outages. The two possible approaches to overcome this problem are fault avoidance and fault tolerance. Quality assurance techniques fail to attain the zero defects mark, making fault tolerance vital to assure mission and business critical systems dependability. One major issue is the difficulty in the verification and validation of sof...