Program Injects Random Faults for Testing Computers

JIFI (Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Implementation of a Fault Injector) is a computer program for studying the ability of a computer to tolerate, detect, and/or recover from faults (that is, bit errors). JIFI affords the capability to inject faults into user-specified central- processing-unit (CPU) registers and memory regions with uniform random distributions in location and time. This capability makes it possible to study the fault sensitivity of either a computer regarded as a complete system or of a specified component of hardware or application software. JIFI operates at the application level and is easy to use. In contrast, prior fault-injection software operates at a lower level and is more difficult to use. JIFI includes fault-injection, profiling, output- verifying, and classifying subprograms that constitute parts of an easy-to-use software interface for performing fault-injection experiments and analyzing the resulting data. JIFI generates a fault-injection-result output file for each run. Data from massive fault-injection campaigns can be collected and processed automatically.