Applying Compiler-Automated Software Fault Tolerance to Multiple Processor Platforms

Abstract

Several recent works have explored the feasibility of using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) processing systems in radiation-prone environments, such as spacecraft. Typically, this approach requires some form of protection to ensure that the software can tolerate radiation upsets without compromising the system. Our recent work, COmpiler Assisted Software fault Tolerance (COAST), provides automated compiler modification of software programs to insert dualor triple-modular redundancy. In this article, we extend COAST to support several new processing platforms, including RISC-V and Xilinx, San Jose, CA, USA, SoC-based products. The automated software protection mechanisms are tested for a variety of configurations, altering the benchmark and cache configuration. Across the different configurations, the cross sections were improved by 4× to 106×. In addition, a hardware-mitigation technique is tested using dual-lock-step cores on the Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX, USA, Hercules platform, which is compared with the softwareonly mitigation approach.