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The Price of Resiliency: a Case Study on Sorting with Memory Faults

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Abstract

We address the problem of sorting in the presence of faults that may arbitrarily corrupt memory locations, and investigate the impact of memory faults both on the correctness and on the running times of mergesort-based algorithms. To achieve this goal, we develop a software testbed that simulates different fault injection strategies, and perform a thorough experimental study using a combination of several fault parameters. Our experiments give evidence that simple-minded approaches to this problem are largely impractical, while the design of more sophisticated resilient algorithms seems really worth the effort. Another contribution of our computational study is a carefully engineered implementation of a resilient sorting algorithm, which appears robust to different memory fault patterns.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Statistica, Probabilità e Statistiche Applicate, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, P.le Aldo Moro 5, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Umberto Ferraro-Petrillo

  2. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Via Salaria 113, 00198, Roma, Italy

    Irene Finocchi

  3. Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemi e Produzione, Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133, Roma, Italy

    Giuseppe F. Italiano

Authors
  1. Umberto Ferraro-Petrillo
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  2. Irene Finocchi
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  3. Giuseppe F. Italiano
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Irene Finocchi.

Additional information

This work has been partially supported by the Sixth Framework Programme of the EU under Contract Number 507613 (Network of Excellence “EuroNGI: Designing and Engineering of the Next Generation Internet”) and by MIUR, the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, under Project MAINSTREAM: (“Algorithms for Massive Information Structures and Data Streams”). A preliminary version of this work was presented at the 14th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA’06).

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Ferraro-Petrillo, U., Finocchi, I. & Italiano, G.F. The Price of Resiliency: a Case Study on Sorting with Memory Faults. Algorithmica 53, 597–620 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-008-9264-1

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