Final Report

Content Assignment

Program Vision

• What are you trying to do? [vision propose assign: AMD]

• Why now? [vision]

• How is it done today? [vision weak; techniques DATE paper has some more; maybe adequate with proposal]

• Trends? [roadmap + vision except detail retained below]

  • TODO: connect low-level fault rate to high-level impact (people will see) [TODO]

    • primarily this is something like: "this fault (variation?) rate will cause this problem in the future"
      • spend X% of time rebooting/recovering ?
      • crash after YY minutes of operation?
      • spend Z% on energy overhead?
      • die after Q (too few) days?
    • horror stories (don't necessarily speak to grounding implications of fault rates for lay public---only grounding the impact of failures of electronic systems)

      • http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=525112&publicationSubCategoryId=200 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Blackout_of_2003 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Incident http://csem.engin.umich.edu/muri/MURIreport2004.pdf http://csem.engin.umich.edu/muri/MURIreport2004.pdf

• What can we accomplish?

  • Build reliable systems from unreliable components [vision]

  • Ground goals [TODO? -- not really have]

• What's new? (Ideas and promising directions) [vision]

• Why do this? [vision maybe some from proposal except bullet retained]

  • Specific big wins (challenges overcome) from focus groups? [probably falls out of mission impact work...]

    • feasible to fly commercial? and/or have any access to most advanced technology? (close commercial/aerospace component gap?); allow areospace to exploit modern electronics?
    • advanced technology safe for drive-by-wire?
    • enable larger (more components, computation) medical devices?

    • enable supercomputers able to solve XXX problems? [maybe can come form BlueGene example? run more than 4 days?]

    • reduce energy used by computers...
    • ??? review focus group output and select appropriate to highlight here ???

  • Why government leadership? [execsums and proposal have maybe 70% of this]

    • leadership: cross-industry
    • economic
    • safety
    • security
• Challenge problems and areas of pain

  • Common/cross-cutting challenges [vision]

  • By focus group (5) [TODO assemble]

    • Commercial
      • Address growing reliability challenge with small enough overhead to avoid negating benefit of scaling
      • Reduce energy per operation while retaining reliable operation
      • Maintain or extend lifetimes in face of increasing wear effects
      • Economically address demand for components with different reliability needs
      • Navigating complex, multidimensional design space
    • Aerospace

      • System lifetimes >> changes in political and scientific need

      • Navigating complex, multidimensional design space
      • Widening gap between commercial and mil/areo components
      • Design for (uncommon) worst-case environment
      • Bottleneck in testing
      • Focus on part reliability over system reliability
    • Large Scale
      • Overhead required to achieve reliability using current and traditional fault-tolerance approaches is too high.
    • Life Critical
    • Infrastructure

• Big Science Questions? [tuneup from proposal]

• Mission Impacts? [working out for technical execsum...]

  • security
  • cyberphysical
  • satellite
  • supercomputer
  • green?
  • ???

• Education [TODO]

  • what's missing in curriculum just to deal with where we are today (not educating EE/CS types about reslience)
  • what's needed to go with this / how revolutionize curriclum

• Critical Questions? (big risk items? ... more strategic questions?) [TODO]

  • enable concurrent research in understanding low-level upset, fatigue effects with ever changing technology along with high-level mitigation
  • manage developer burden (avoid increasing)
  • must be careful not to add complexity that makes things worse (e.g. pushing more complexity into software without adequate validation that the software will handle appropriately)
  • how deal with legacy software (don't want to take this as an absolute mandate that inhibits innovation, but should be some thinking about how to handle things without complete rewrite)
  • ??? others

• Metrics, Goals, Measure and manage programs [??? Missing Metrics report ... might be some in DATE metrics paper? probably still a gap]

  • Goals of metrics
    • assess if proposed research proposing to attack the right problems?
    • measure if research making progress on solving the problem?
  • Some possible, primary metrics
    • Energy/Op at noise rate and performance target (Noise rate: defects, variation wear, transients)
    • Post-fab adaptability to range of noise rates
    • Timeliness and quality of adaptation
  • Recommendations from metrics group

• Research Organization and Infrastructure (see discussion starter ResearchOrgInfra) [carter working on initial draft]

• Examples and Illustrative Scenarios

  • Processor [probably in techniques/examples DATE paper]

  • SoC [TODO -- see how much coverage is in techniques DATE paper]

  • High-level software [TODO]

• Layer discussion and community contributions: probably good to have a clear description of the layers and callout the wide range of communities that could participate in this research [TODO]

• Process and Participants

  • summarize activities of group (meetings, wiki, focus groups...) [TODO---pretty mechanical]

  • comprehensive list of participants