Understanding the propagation of hard errors to software and implications for resilient system design

Man Lap Li, Pradeep Ramachandran, Swarup K. Sahoo, Sarita V. Adve, Vikram S. Adve, Yuanyuan Zhou

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

With continued CMOS scaling, future shipped hardware will be increasingly vulnerable to in-the-field faults. To be broadly deployable, the hardware reliability solution must incur low overheads, precluding use of expensive redundancy. We explore a cooperative hardware-software solution that watches for anomalous software behavior to indicate the presence of hardware faults. Fundamental to such a solution is a characterization of how hardware faults in different microarchitectural structures of a modern processor propagate through the application and OS. This paper aims to provide such a characterization, resulting in identifying low-cost detection methods and providing guidelines for implementation of the recovery and diagnosis components of such a reliability solution. We focus on hard faults because they are increasingly important and have different system implications than the much studied transients. We achieve our goals through fault injection experiments with a microarchitecture-level full system timing simulator. Our main results are: (1) we are able to detect 95% of the unmasked faults in 7 out of 8 studied microarchitectural structures with simple detectors that incur zero to little hardware overhead; (2) over 86% of these detections are within latencies that existing hardware checkpointing schemes can handle, while others require software checkpointing; and (3) a surprisingly large fraction of the detected faults corrupt OS state, but almost all of these are detected with latencies short enough to use hardware checkpointing, thereby enabling OS recovery in virtually all such cases.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)265-276
Number of pages12
JournalACM SIGPLAN Notices
Volume43
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2008

Keywords

  • Architecture
  • Error detection
  • Fault injection
  • Permanent fault

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science(all)

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