ESoftCheck: Removal of non-vital checks for fault tolerance

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

As semiconductor technology scales into the deep submicron regime the occurrence of transient or soft errors will increase. This will require new approaches to error detection. Software checking approaches are attractive because they require little hardware modification and can be easily adjusted to fit different reliability and performance requirements. Unfortunately, software checking adds a significant performance overhead. In this paper we present ESoftCheck, a set of compiler optimization techniques to determine which are the vital checks, that is, the minimum number of checks that are necessary to detect an error and roll back to a correct program state. ESoftCheck identifies the vital checks on platforms where registers are hardware-protected with parity or ECC, when there are redundant checks and when checks appear in loops. ESoftCheck also provides knobs to trade reliability for performance based on the support for recovery and the degree of trustiness of the operations. Our experimental results on a Pentium 4 show that ESoftCheck can obtain 27.1% performance improvement without losing fault coverage.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2009 CGO - 7th International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization
Pages35-46
Number of pages12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Event7th International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, CGO 2009 - Seattle, WA, United States
Duration: Apr 22 2009Apr 25 2009

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2009 CGO - 7th International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization

Other

Other7th International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, CGO 2009
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle, WA
Period4/22/094/25/09

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Software

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