skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: VPP: The Vulnerability-Proportional Protection Paradigm Towards Reliable Autonomous Machines
The next ubiquitous computing platform, after personal computers and smartphones, is likely one of the autonomous natures, such as drones, robots, and self-driving cars, which have moved from mere lab concepts to permeating almost every aspect of our soci- ety [16, 20, 25]. Behind the proliferation of autonomous machines is the critical need to ensure reliability [7, 22–24]. Almost every vendor, be it in the software, hardware, or systems segment, has to conform to functional safety standards when shipping products for automotives. Today’s resiliency solutions to autonomous machines, however, all make fundamental trade-offs between resiliency and cost, which manifests as high overhead in performance, energy, and chip area. For instance, hardware modular redundancy provides high safety but more than doubles the area and energy cost [1]. The reason is that today’s solutions are of the “one-size-fits-all” nature: they use the same protection scheme throughout the entire computing stack of autonomous machines. As a result, they have to accommodate the least robust component, leading to a high protection overhead. The insight of this paper is that for a resiliency solution to pro- vide high protection coverage while introducing little cost, we must exploit the inherent robustness variations in the domain-specific autonomous machine computing. In particular, we show that the different autonomous machine kernels differ significantly in their inherent robustness and performance. Building on top of that, we propose a Vulnerable-Proportional Protection (VPP) design paradigm, in which the protection budget, be it spatially (e.g., modular re- dundancy) or temporally (e.g., re-execution), should be inversely proportional to the inherent robustness of a task in the autonomous machine system. In stark contrast to the existing “one-size-fits-all” strategy, VPP wisely allocates the protection budget, thus achieving the same protection coverage with little overhead, which provides a blueprint design paradigm towards reliable autonomous machines  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2103951
PAR ID:
10514293
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
workshop
Date Published:
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; (, ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization)
    null (Ed.)
    Multicores increasingly deploy safety-critical parallel applications that demand resiliency against soft-errors to satisfy the safety standards. However, protection against these errors is challenging due to complex communication and data access protocols that aggressively share on-chip hardware resources. Research has explored various temporal and spatial redundancy-based resiliency schemes that provide multicores with high soft-error coverage. However, redundant execution incurs performance overheads due to interference effects induced by aggressive resource sharing. Moreover, these schemes require intrusive hardware modifications and fall short in providing efficient system availability guarantees. This article proposes PRISM, a resilient multicore architecture that incorporates strong hardware isolation to form redundant clusters of cores, ensuring a non-interference-based redundant execution environment. A soft error in one cluster does not effect the execution of the other cluster, resulting in high system availability. Implementing strong isolation for shared hardware resources, such as queues, caches, and networks requires logic for partitioning. However, it is less intrusive as complex hardware modifications to protocols, such as hardware cache coherence, are avoided. The PRISM approach is prototyped on a real Tilera Tile-Gx72 processor that enables primitives to implement the proposed cluster-level hardware resource isolation. The evaluation shows performance benefits from avoiding destructive hardware interference effects with redundant execution, while delivering superior system availability. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; (, International Test Conference)
    null (Ed.)
    The advent of pervasive autonomous systems such as self-driving cars and drones has raised questions about their safety and trustworthiness. This is particularly relevant in the event of on-board subsystem errors or failures. In this research, we show how encoded Extended Kalman Filter can be used to detect anomalous behaviors of critical components of nonlinear autonomous systems: sensors, actuators, state estimation algorithms and control software. As opposed to prior work that is limited to linear systems or requires the use of cumbersome machine learned checks with fixed detection thresholds, the proposed approach necessitates the use of time-varying checks with dynamically adaptive thresholds. The method is lightweight in comparison to existing methods (does not rely on machine learning paradigms) and achieves high coverage as well as low detection latency of errors. A quadcopter and an automotive steer-by-wire system are used as test vehicles for the research and simulation and hardware results indicate the overhead, coverage and error detection latency benefits of the proposed approach. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; (, ACM)
    Commercial autonomous machines is a thriving sector, one that is likely the next ubiquitous computing platform, after Personal Computers (PC), cloud computing, and mobile computing. Nevertheless, a suitable computing substrate for autonomous machines is missing, and many companies are forced to develop ad hoc computing solutions that are neither principled nor extensible. By analyzing the demands of autonomous machine computing, this article proposes Dataflow Accelerator Architecture (DAA), a modern instantiation of the classic dataflow principle, that matches the characteristics of autonomous machine software. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; (, 2019 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC))
    Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are being used more and more every day in almost any area to solve challenging real-life problems. Increased autonomy and advancements in low-cost high-computing technologies made these compact autonomous solutions accessible to any party with ease. However, this ease of use brings its own challenges that need to be addressed. In an autonomous flight scenario over a public space, an autonomous operation plan has to consider the public safety and regulations as well as the task specific objectives. In this work, we propose a generic utility function for the path planning of UAS operations that includes the benefits of accomplishing the goals as well as the safety risks incurred along the flight trajectories, with the purpose of making task-level decisions through the optimization of the carefully constructed utility function for a given scenario. As an optimizer, we benefited from a multi-tree variant of the optimal T-RRT * (Multi-T-RRT * path planning algorithm. To illustrate its operation, results of simulation of a UAS scenario are presented. 
    more » « less
  5. (, International Symposium on Search Based Software Engineering SSBSE 2018)
    To provide strong security support for today’s applications, microprocessor manufacturers have introduced hardware isolation, an on-chip mechanism that provides secure accesses to sensitive data. Currently, hardware isolation is still difficult to use by software developers because the process to identify access points to sensitive data is error-prone and can lead to under and over protection of sensitive data. Under protection can lead to security vulnerabilities. Over protection can lead to an increased attack surface and excessive communication overhead. In this paper we describe EvoIsolator, a search-based framework to (i) automatically generate executable minimal slices that include all access points to a set of specified sensitive data; and (ii) automatically optimize (for small code block size and low communication overhead) the code modules for hardware isolation. We demonstrate, through a small feasibility study, the potential impact of our proposed code optimizer. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email