A major step toward the development of fault-tolerant computer systems is the validation of the dependability properties of these systems. Fault/error injection has been recognized as a powerful approach to validate the fault tolerance mechanisms of a system and to obtain statistics on parameters such as coverages and latencies. This paper describes the methodology and guidelines for the design of flexible software based fault and error injection and presents a tool, FERRARI, that incorporates the techniques. The techniques used to emulate transient errors and permanent faults in software are described in detail. Experimental results are presented for several error detection techniques, and they demonstrate the effectiveness of the software-based error injection tool in evaluating the dependability properties of complex systems.>

Error detection and error isolation are becoming stringent requirements for many computational problems requiring high reliability in addition to high performance. This paper presents CAPACETI, a technique for utilizing capabilities at the application level in order to achieve dependable operations. The proposed technique is further augmented with executable assertions and other software error detection techniques. The effectiveness of the techniques to detect errors, their contribution to the overall coverage, and their performance overhead were experimentally obtained using fault/error injection. Results obtained from these experiments show that high coverage with a low performance overhead can be achieved by selectively combining different error detection techniques.