Designing reliable algorithms in unreliable memories

Some of the present day applications run on computer platforms with large and inexpensive memories, which are also error-prone. Unfortunately, the appearance of even very few memory faults may jeopardize the correctness of the computational results. We say that an algorithm is resilient to memory faults if, despite the corruption of some memory values before or during its execution, it is nevertheless able to get a correct output at least on the set of uncorrupted values (i.e., the algorithm works correctly on uncorrupted data). In this paper we will survey some recent works on resilient algorithms and try to give some insight into the main algorithmic techniques used.