Software Component Replication for Improved Fault-tolerance: Can Multicore Processors Make It Work??

Abstract. Programs increasingly rely on the use of complex component libraries, such as in-memory databases. As any other software, these li-braries have bugs that may lead to the application failure. In this work we revisit the idea of software component replication for masking software bugs in the context of multi-core systems. We propose a new abstraction: a Macro-Component. A Macro-Component is a software component that includes several internal replicas with diverse implementations to detect and mask bugs. By relying on modern multicores processing capacity it is possible to execute the same operation in multiple replicas concurrently, thus incurring in minimal overhead. Also, by exploring the multiple ex-istent implementations of well-known interfaces, it is possible to use the idea without incurring in additional development cost.