Relaxed determinism: making redundant execution on multiprocessors practical

  • Authors:

  • Jesse Pool;Ian Sin Kwok Wong;David Lie

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto

  • Venue:
  • HOTOS'07 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX workshop on Hot topics in operating systems
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Given that the majority of future processors will contain an abundance of execution cores, redundant execution can offer a promising method for increasing the availability and resilience against intrusions of computing systems. However, redundant execution systems rely on the premise that when external input is duplicated identically to a set of replicas executing the same program, the replicas will produce identical outputs unless they are compromised or experience an error. Unfortunately, threaded applications exhibit nondeterminism that breaks this premise and current redundant execution systems are unable to account for this non-determinism, especially on multiprocessors. In this paper, we introduce a method called relaxed determinism that is utilized by our system, called Replicant, to support redundant execution with reasonable performance while tolerating non-determinism.