This paper evaluates the impact of transient errors in the operating system of a COTS-based system (CETIA board with two PowerPC 750 processors running LynxOS) and quantifies their effects at both the OS and at the application level. The study has been conducted using a Software-Implemented Fault Injection tool (Xception) and both realistic programs and synthetic workloads (to focus on specific OS features) have been used. The results provide a comprehensive picture of the impact of faults on LynxOS key features (process scheduling and the most frequent system calls), data integrity, error propagation, application termination, and correctness of application results.

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P u b lic r e p o r tin g b u r o e n l o r t h is c o lle c tio n o f in fo r m a tio n is e s tim a te d to a v e r a g e 1 h o u r p e r r e s p o n s e , in c lu d in g t h e t im e to r r e v ie w in g in s tr u c tio n s , s e a r c h in g e x is tin g d a t a s o u r c e s , g a th e r in g a n d m a m ta in n g t h e d a t a n e e d e d , a n d c o m p le tin g a n d r e v ie w in g t h e c o lle c tio n o f in fo r m a tio n . S e n d c o m m e n t r e g a r d in g t h is b u r d e n e s t im a te s o r a n y o t h e r a s p e c t o f t h is c o lle c tio n o f in fo r m a tio n , s i d u d in g s u g g e s tio n s t o r r e d u c in g th is b u r d e n , t o W a s h in g to n H e a d q u a r t e r s S e r v ic e s . D ir e c t o r a t e f o r « f o r m a tio nO p e r a t io n s a n d R e p o r ts . 1 2 1 5 J e f f e r s o n D a v is H ig h w a y . S u it e 1 2 0 4 . A r lin g to n . V A 2 2 2 0 2 -4 3 0 2 . a n d to t h e O ff ic e o f M a n a g e m e n t a n d B u d g e t. P a p e r w o r k R e d u c tio n P r o je c t ( 0 7 0 4 -0 1 8 8 ) . W a s h in g t o n . D C 2 0 5 0 3 . . AGENCY USE ONLY (Leave blank)2. REPORT DATE A p r i l 2 0 0 2 REPORT TYPE AND DATES COVERED TITLE AND SUBTITLE 5. FUNDING NUMBERSAn E x p e r i m e n t a l E v a l u a t i o n o f t h e REE S IF T E n v i r o n m e n t f o r S p a c e b o r n e A p p l i c a t i o n s AUTHOR(S)K . W h i s n a n t , R . K . I y e r , Z . K a l b a r c z y k , P . J o n e s PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAMES(S) AND ADDRESS(ES)COORDINATED SCIENCE LABORATORY 1 3 0 8 W. MAIN S T . URBANA, I L 6 1 8 0 1 SPONSORING / MONITORING AGENCY NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 10. SPONSORING / MONITORING AGENCY REPORT NUMBER SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 12a. DISTRIBUTION / AVAILABILITY STATEMENTApproved for public release; distribution unlimited. b. DISTRIBUTION CODE ABSTRACT (Maximum 200 words)This paper presents an experimental evaluation of a software-implemented fault tolerance (SIFT) environ ment built around a set of self-checking processes called ARMORs running on different machines that provide error detection and recovery services to themselves and to spaceborne scientific applications. The experiments are split into three groups of error injections, with each group successively stressing the SIFT error detection and recovery more than the previous group. The results show that the SIFT environment adds negligible overhead to the application during failure-free runs. Only 28 cases from over 28,000 error injections were observed in which either the application failed to start or the SIFT environment failed to recognize that the application had completed. Further investigations showed that assertions within the SIFT processescoupled with object-based incremental checkpointingwere effective in preventing system failures by protecting dynamic data within the SIFT processes. SUBJECT TERMS f a u l t i n j e c t i o n , d i s t r i b u t e d c o m p u t in g , s o f t w a r eim p le m e n t e d f a u l t t o l e r a n c e NUMBER IF PAGES Abstract Few distributed software-impleme...

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