Summary of Third Meeting (Oct 29--30, 2009, Austin, TX)

[AMD note: where possible, I've tried to pullout themes and order by importance rather than writing a chronological book report]

Goals

• paragraph of framing for this meeting

Tuning up Story

• (some directions to improve intro (10-20 slide) story---important as this is refining the story we'll be telling funders...and may be similar template to some of the documents)
• more crisply define the goal; including: draw layers -- show error in logic; and handled by higher layers
• include education
• need to reflect fault rate up to system level for examples.
  • (e.g., This means your computer reboots once an hour? ...replace your processor every 10 minutes?)
• should missions include {energy, economy} ?
• better communicate this as a revolution

Framing for public: Immuno-Logic

• Immune system analogy: layered defesne system
  • physical
  • innate
  • adaptive
• sell story
  • create value in US
  • competitiveness
  • jobs
  • protect us

Government/Strategy

• NSF
  • talk to Engineering
  • come back to NSF with SRC as partner
• SRC
  • get quotes form principals at IBM, Intel, Freescale
  • potential for new companies (e.g. CISCO)
  • customer directed funding

Education

• resilience not currently being taught in EE, CS education
  • System Reliability exist as discipline, but not part of EE, CS education
• how educate computer engineers on system reliability?
• K-12 inspiration (FIRST, CubeSATs)
• Competitions (c.f. best branch predictor..., DARPA Grand Challenge)
• Added discussion page on Wiki to develop further

Research Organization

• needs cross-cut work; not pushed forward by single-domain projects
• big teams and centers?
• serialization of research not an option (e.g. get accurate model of device effects then do arch/software design)
  • data for process reliability is late---never have it before start design
• standard platforms/models---maybe preference to fund sharable platform work first?
• relation/tie-in-to power management infrastructure
• benchmarking/contests (something to fund early)

Life Critical

• standards (IEC 61508)
• technology
  • want to see history of technology before adopt
  • automotive in production with 130nm (just starting to look at 90nm)
  • medical 250nm smallest in production now (looking at 90nm)
  • medical may never adopt 45nm
• automotive (ISO 26262)
  • requirement is 0 PPM failure (but doesn't say 0 PPB, so sounds like 0.1 PPM acceptable)
  • 20 year life

  • probability of dangerous failure/hour < 10^{-7}

  • always need more performance
• medical
  • highly regulated

  • driven by low-power needs --> battery must last 5-10 years

  • electronic processing needs/content is growing
  • transients lead to power-on-reset
    • seeing increase in soft errors
    • soft errors now in PPM range (AMD: not sure what that means? needs a time component? per million hours???)
    • sometimes physician response to transient is to explant device
• need for ways to demonstrate/quantify resilience
• differences with other constituencies? (things they want to highlight)
  • beyond silicon---also analog, passives
    • (not a difference, also hear from computer, aerospace, just not focus of this effort -- note DARPA HEALICS)
  • need better reliability than current silicon (also not clearly a difference)

Infrastructure

• physical distribution of sites (access/maintenance, delay in information propagation)

• compute << machine being controlled (cost of compute not dominate plant)

• degraded fallback possible (incl. fail off)
• autonomous (power scavenged) monitoring
• availability key metric (short fail-over tolerable)

Roadmap

• still plan to add extrinsic noise model; will shift curves upward (more problematic)

Metrics

• composition calculation must be more than summing FITs (otherwise, not account benefit of mitigation techniques)
• FIT rate decompose
  • persistent vs. transient
  • impact
    • detected and corrected (slowdown)
    • failure of one application or VM (IBM speak: partition)
    • failure of full system
    • silent data corruption (SDC)
• availability metrics (2D matrix -- event-rate and time-to-recover at each type/rate)
• standardizing FIT ranges?
• measure resilience of common things [in beam?] as an eye opener (map etherial into things people might understand)
  • e.g. house alarm (fire? intruder?), voting machine, Point-of-Sale terminal?)
  • step toward consumer reports or standards...
• specmark for reliability

Addressing Challenges? (orphaned point)

• public health system

Next Steps / Our path forward

• reports from constituency groups by Dec. 1 (?)
• quotes from executives soon (mid. Nov.?)
• workshop summary (this) distributable by end of Nov.
• 2p executive summary during November
• DATE papers (driver for draft of key pieces) by end of Nov.
• full report draft assembled in January? (cleaned up/polished in February?)
• input to SRC December?
• lobbying SRC, DARPA, NSF, others? ...