Analyzing Reliability in Hybrid Compute Units

Modern development of computing systems caters the collaboration of human-based resources together with machine-based resources as active compute units. Those units can be dynamically provisioned on-demand for solving complex tasks, such as observed in collaborative applications, crowd sourced applications, and human task workflows. Such collaborations involve very diverse compute units, which have different capabilities and reliability. While the reliability analysis for machine-based compute units has been widely developed, the reliability analysis for the hybrid human-machine collaborations has not been extensively studied. In this paper we present models and a framework for analyzing the reliability of hybrid compute units (HCU), which represent on-demand collectives of humans collaboration supported by machines (hardware and software units) for performing tasks. We present the implementation of our models and study the reliability of HCUs in a simulated system for infrastructure maintenance scenarios. Our evaluation shows that the proposed framework is effective for measuring the reliability of the collaboration collectives, and beneficial to obtain insights for improvements.