Managing Dynamic Reconfiguration for Fault-tolerance on a Manycore Architecture

With the advent of many core architectures comprising hundreds of processing elements, fault management has become a major challenge. We present an approach that uses the occam-pi language to manage the fault recovery mechanism on a new many core architecture, the Platform 2012 (P2012). The approach is made possible by extending our previously developed compiler framework to compile occam-pi implementations to the P2012 architecture. We describe the techniques used to translate the salient features of the occam-pi language to the native programming model of the P2012 architecture. We demonstrate the applicability of the approach by an experimental case study, in which the DCT algorithm is implemented on a set of four processing elements. During run-time, some of the tasks are then relocated from assumed faulty processing elements to the faultless ones by means of dynamic reconfiguration of the hardware. The working of the demonstrator and the simulation results illustrate not only the feasibility of the approach but also how the use of higher-level abstractions simplifies the fault handling.