Characterization of Error-Tolerant Applications when Protecting Control Data

Author Info

Darshan D. Thaker, University of California - Davis
Diana Franklin, California Polytechnic State University - San Luis ObispoFollow
John Y. Oliver, University of California - DavisFollow
Susmit Biswas, University of California - Santa Barbara
Derek Lockhart, California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo
Tzvetan Metodi, University of California - Davis
Frederic T. Chong, University of California - Santa Barbara

Recommended Citation

Published in Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization: San Jose, CA, October 25, 2006, pages 142-149.

NOTE: At the time of publication, the author John Oliver was not yet affiliated with Cal Poly.

The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1109/IISWC.2006.302738.

Abstract

Soft errors have become a significant concern and recent studies have measured the "architectural vulnerability factor" of systems to such errors, or conversely, the potential that a soft error is masked by latches or other system behavior. We take soft-error tolerance one step further and examine when an application can tolerate errors that are not masked. For example, a video decoder or approximation algorithm can tolerate errors if the user is willing to accept degraded output. The key observation is that while the decoder can tolerate error in its data, it can not tolerate error in its control. We first present static analysis that protects most control operations. We examine several SPEC CPU2000 and MiBench benchmarks for error tolerance, develop fidelity measures for each, and quantify the effect of errors on fidelity. We show that protecting control is crucial to producing error-tolerance, for without this protection, many applications experience catastrophic errors (infinite execution time or crashing). Overall, our results indicate that with simple control protection, the error tolerance of many applications can provide designers with considerable added flexibility when considering future challenges posed by soft errors.

Disciplines

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Copyright

2006 IEEE.

Publisher statement

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