Adding capability checks enhances error detection and isolation in object-based systems

Error detection and error isolation are becoming stringent requirements for many computational problems requiring high reliability in addition to high performance. This paper presents CAPACETI, a technique for utilizing capabilities at the application level in order to achieve dependable operations. The proposed technique is further augmented with executable assertions and other software error detection techniques. The effectiveness of the techniques to detect errors, their contribution to the overall coverage, and their performance overhead were experimentally obtained using fault/error injection. Results obtained from these experiments show that high coverage with a low performance overhead can be achieved by selectively combining different error detection techniques.