Design and evaluation of automated checks for signal processing applications
Vivek Nair, Hyun Kim, Narayanan Krishnamurthy, Jacob A. Abraham · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
Most of the signal processing application programs involve computationally intensive iterative steps. In such programs, various failures in the underlying hardware manifest as control-flow errors that affect the reliability of the computed results. Various techniques have been proposed in the past to detect and recover from such control-flow errors. Unfortunately, all these techniques need either additional hardware or modification of the hardware and are not portable across various platforms. To circumvent these limitations, recently we have developed a high-level control-flow checking approach using assertions (CCA). In CCA, branch-free intervals in a given high-level language program are identified and the entry and exit points of the intervals are fortified through pre-inserted assertions. In this paper we describe an implementation of CCA through a pre-processor that will automatically insert the necessary assertions into a high-level language program. Based on the implementation we study the fault detection capabilities of CCA with the help of fault injection experiments using FERRARI.