Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ToRH (A Theory of Reliable Hardware)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2020-08-01 al 2021-06-30
A main focus of the project is the development of highly reliable, accurate, and efficient clock generation and distribution methods. Traditional designs cannot cope with permanent faults and have limits in scalability, which we address by devising fault-tolerant distributed clocking methods. If successful, this enables faster, better, and cheaper computers. As computers (and computing devices) are omnipresent, this has the potential of large economical benefits.
The above approach is based on worst-case modeling of metastability propagation. Despite some impossibility/hardness results, we were positively surprised by how far this can be taken. Apart from theoretical insights, we also learned that, intuitively, metastability of storage elements can usually (or almost always?) be effectively masked into late output transitions. This suggests that for the main objectives of the project, devising a "more universal" framework for metastability modeling is not crucial. Overall, we made significant progress with respect to the first objective.
As evidenced by the listed publications, there has been progress on Objective 2 as well; a number of algorithms and general constructions has been obtained, mostly, but not exclusively, in the context of metastability-containing computations.
Concerning Objective 3, no technological impact has been realized so far. Given the long road from theory to a product, this was to be expected in the first reporting period. I would have hoped for industry and practice-oriented researchers to be more willing to collaborate towards products. As this is not the case (yet), I'm planning to set up the aforementioned project with Milos Krstic in order to obtain tangible results that are easier to market.