Gem5-Approxilyzer: An Open-Source Tool for Application-Level Soft Error Analysis

Radha Venkatagiri, Khalique Ahmed, Abdulrahman Mahmoud, Sasa Misailovic, Darko Marinov, Christopher W. Fletcher, Sarita V. Adve

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

Abstract

Modern systems are increasingly susceptible to soft errors in the field and traditional redundancy-based mitigation techniques are too expensive to protect against all errors. Recent techniques, such as approximate computing and various low-cost resilience mechanisms, intelligently trade off inaccuracy in program output for better energy, performance, and resiliency overhead. A fundamental requirement for realizing the full potential of these techniques is a thorough understanding of how applications react to errors. Approxilyzer is a state-of-The-Art tool that enables an accurate, efficient, and comprehensive analysis of how errors in almost all dynamic instructions in a program's execution affect the quality of the final program output. While useful, its adoption is limited by its implementation using the proprietary Simics infrastructure and the SPARC ISA. We present gem5-Approxilyzer, a re-implementation of Approxilyzer using the open-source gem5 simulator. gem5-Approxilyzer can be extended to different ISAs, starting with x86 in this work. We show that gem5-Approxilyzer is both efficient (up to two orders of magnitude reduction in error injections over a naive campaign) and accurate (average 92% for our experiments) in predicting the program's output quality in the presence of errors. We also compare the error profiles of five workloads under x86 and SPARC to further motivate the need for a tool like gem5-Approxilyzer.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2019
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages214-221
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781728100562
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2019
Event49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2019 - Portland, United States
Duration: Jun 24 2019Jun 27 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings - 49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2019

Conference

Conference49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland
Period6/24/196/27/19

Keywords

  • Approximate Computing
  • Fault Tolerance
  • Reliability
  • Soft Errors

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
  • Hardware and Architecture

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