Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Low-Power Dependable Computing
Dakai K. Zhu, Muhammad Shafique, Man Lin, Sudeep Pasricha · IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing · 2018
The papers in this special section focus on low power dependable computing systems (LPDC). Faults (especially transient faults that lead to soft errors) have become more common due to the miniaturization of computing systems with continuously scaled technology sizes. Thus, it is imperative for most modern computing systems to deploy one or more types of fault-tolerance techniques. Traditionally, fault tolerance has been achieved through various error reduction, detection, and recovery techniques at different levels of the hardware/software stacks (e.g., circuit, architecture, operating systems, compiler, and application software), which generally incur power and energy overheads. Given the fact that energy has become a first-class system resource (especially for batterypowered mobile and IoT devices), it is important to understand the interdependencies between system reliability and power/energy consumption, and further investigate techniques that can address their tradeoffs. This special issue on Low-Power Dependable Computing (LPDC) seeks to tackle these challenges by exploring novel and bold ideas to achieve energy-efficient reliable computations in modern computing systems.