Termination checking and task decomposition for task-based intermittent programs

Abstract

Emerging energy-harvesting computer systems extract energy from their environment to compute, sense, and communicate with no battery or tethered power supply. Building software for energy-harvesting devices is a challenge, because they operate only intermittently as energy is available. Programs frequently reboot due to power loss, which can corrupt program state and prevent forward progress. Task-based programming models allow intermittent execution of long-running applications, but require the programmer to decompose code into tasks that will eventually complete between two power failures. Task decomposition is challenging and no tools exist to aid in task decomposition.