Title :
A software multilevel fault injection mechanism: case study evaluating the Virtual Interface Architecture
Author :
Liu, Ting ; Kalbarczyk, Zbignew ; Iyer, Ravishankar K.
Author_Institution :
Center for Reliable & High Performance Comput., Illinois Univ., Urbana, IL, USA
Abstract :
The characteristics of failures occurring in networked computing systems are still poorly understood. As a consequence, this is a rich area for exploration, especially with the arrival of new network interface standards, such as the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) adopted by Microsoft, Intel and Compaq. The goal of VIA is to improve the performance of distributed applications by reducing the latency associated with the exchange of critical message between processes in Windows NT-based systems. In this paper, we propose the SMiFI (Software Multilevel Fault Injection) mechanism to evaluate the failure characteristics of networked systems, specifically VIA. The mechanism covers all software protocol layers of the host interface and corrupts both the messages and the computation engines that manipulate the messages
Keywords :
distributed processing; failure analysis; network interfaces; program diagnostics; software performance evaluation; Microsoft Windows NT-based systems; SMiFI; VIA; Virtual Interface Architecture; case study; computation engine corruption; critical message exchange latency; distributed applications performance; message corruption; message manipulation; network interface standard; networked computing system failures; software multilevel fault injection mechanism; software protocol layers; Application software; Computer aided software engineering; Computer architecture; Computer interfaces; Computer networks; Engines; Hardware; Kernel; Logic programming; Telecommunication network reliability;
Conference_Titel :
Reliable Distributed Systems, 1999. Proceedings of the 18th IEEE Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Lausanne
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-0290-3
DOI :
10.1109/RELDIS.1999.805113
