ACM Comm 2016 08 Toward Reliable Programming for Unreliable Hardware (Notes)

"Computational Biology in the 21st Century" CACM August 2016

Toward Reliable Programming for Unreliable Hardware by Todd Millstein, p. 82.

Toward Reliable Programming for Unreliable Hardware

It's not a bug; it's a feature!
Always assume a far less than perfect world.

Ideas

1. Sometimes tolerating a bug outweighs its negative impact on the application.
   1. See Good Enough and Biological Evolution.
2. Soft Errors - Transient hardware faults. Some introduce erroneous data into computations.
3. Approximate Computations - Naturally error-tolerant applications.
4. How likely is a bug to occur?
5. How will a bug affect the application?
6. How can an application react to hardware errors when it doesn't know what hardware it is on?
   1. Especially hardware introduced after it was published?
7. Software and Hardware might be faulty, but comparison with reality is always the best test.

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Parent Article: Reading Notes