Reliable Systolic Computing Through Redundancy

The systolic array paradigm has low communication demand because it does not use costly global communication and each processor communicates with few other processors. It is thus suitable to be used in cluster computing. The systolic approach, however, is vulnerable in a heterogeneous environment where machines perform differently. In this paper we propose a redundant systolic solution with high-availability to deal with this problem. We analyze the overhead that results from the need to coordinate the actions of the redundant processors and show that this overhead is worth the performance improvement it provides.