MPSoC application resilience by hardware-assisted communication virtualization

•The resilience of applications on MPSoCs can be increased with task relocations.•Task relocations involve an efficient reconfiguration of the communication layer.•The mechanisms are derived from Protection-Switching techniques in Wide-Area-Networks.•The proposed mechanisms reduce the latency impacts of stateless task migrations.•The reconfiguration protocol should be offloaded from the productive processor cores.

Future MPSoCs will become increasingly vulnerable to environmental and manufacturing variabilities, which can lead to transient and permanent faults during operation. These dependability issues can be tackled with a system-level approach, which migrates tasks away from unreliable processor elements. In this paper we evaluate the usage of protection switching techniques to enable an efficient communication reconfiguration during task migration, which minimizes the task downtime and increases the applicability of this approach. We compare the performance of the dualcast and forward protocols with the common approach of a communication suspension during migration. Furthermore, we investigate the offload of the protocol handling from the productive processor cores and the differences with stateless and stateful task migration. The results show that dualcast and forward outperform the common approach in terms of communication latencies and enable a nearly seamless migration of stateless tasks if the protocol is offloaded.