Fault Tolerance Using Dynamic Reconfiguration on the POEtic Tissue

Abstract

Fault tolerance is a crucial operational aspect of biological systems and the self-repair capabilities of complex organisms far exceeds that of even the most advanced electronic devices. While many of the processes used by nature to achieve fault tolerance cannot easily be applied to silicon-based systems, in this paper we show that mechanisms loosely inspired by the operation of multicellular organisms can be transported to electronic systems to provide self-repair capabilities. Features such as dynamic routing, reconfiguration, and on-chip reprogramming can be invaluable for the realization of adaptive hardware systems and for the design of highly complex systems based on the kind of unreliable components that are likely to be introduced in the not-too-distant future. In this paper, we describe the implementation of fault tolerant features that address error detection and recovery through dynamic routing, reconfiguration, and on-chip reprogramming in a novel application specific integrated circuit. We take inspiration from three biological models: phylogenesis, ontogenesis, and epigenesis (hence the POE in POEtic). As in nature, our approach is based on a set of separate and complementary techniques that exploit the novel mechanisms provided by our device in the particular context of fault tolerance.

Partial-DNA cyclic memory for bio-inspired electronic cell

“…Many researchers have made great effort to achieve this aim, and several bioinspired chips have been researched, such as POEtic [14,25,26] and Ubichip [27].…”

Systemic Computation Using Graphics Processors

“…The simulation was implemented in ANSI C on a PowerBook Macintosh G4, enabling systemic computation programs to be simulated using conventional computer processors. Later work by Le Martelot created a second implementation on PCs with a higher-level language and visualization tools [2,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12]14]. Other work provided a discussion on the use of sensor networks to implement a systemic computer [13].…”

“…The binary knapsack implementation in the Systemic Computation language is derived from the genetic algorithm model developed for systemic computation in [2]. There are three different solutions, as shown in Figure 3: uninitialized solutions, initialized solutions, and final solutions.…”

“…Several research groups have focused on this area for many years, resulting in novel bio-inspired architectures such as the POEtic tissue [2] and the Ubichip of Perplexus project [3], as well as formalisms such as PI-Calculus, Bi-Graphs [4] and Brane Computing [5]. Systemic computation is a similar attempt to exploit desirable natural properties such as parallelism within a computer, developed in 2005 [1].…”

The Perplexus bio-inspired reconfigurable circuit

“…However, some key factors from multicellular beings have been identified for use in the design of ontogenetic machines: the dependence of cell's functionality upon its relative position, the relevance of the physical neighborhood for chemical interactions between cells, the importance of time scales during cellular reproduction, and the fundamental role played by protein's regulation and cell's differentiation, which is driven by regulatory and differentiation genes. Research projects as Embryonics [6] (embryonic electronics) and POEtic [1,10,11] have studied the issues related to hardware implementations of such mechanisms.…”