Nonintrusive Automatic Compiler-Guided Reliability Improvement of Embedded Applications Under Proton Irradiation

A method is presented for automated improvement of embedded application reliability. The compilation process is guided using genetic algorithms and a multiobjective optimization approach (MOOGAs). Even though modern compilers are not designed to generate reliable builds, they can be tuned to obtain compilations that improve their reliability, through simultaneous optimization of their fault coverage, execution time, and memory size. Experiments show that relevant reliability improvements can be obtained from an efficient exploration of the compilation solutions space. Fault-injection simulation campaigns are performed to assess our proposal against different benchmarks, and the results are assessed against a real Advanced RISC Machines-based system-on-chip under proton irradiation.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and in part by the European Regional Development Fund through projects: “Evaluación temprana de los efectos de radiación mediante simulación y virtualización, Estrategias de mitigación en arquitecturas de microprocesadores avanzados, and Centro de Ensayos Combinados de Irradiación” under Grant ESP2015-68245-C4-3-P and Grant ESP2015-68245-C4-4-P (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness/European Regional Development Fund, European Union)