PRESAGE: Protecting Structured Address Generation against Soft Errors

TL;DR

PRESAGE is a lightweight compiler-driven technique designed to detect soft errors in structured address generation, significantly improving error detection while maintaining low overheads in large-scale computing systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that enables error flow in address computations, allowing detectors to be placed at loop exits for efficient silent data corruption detection.

Findings

High error detection rate in experiments

Low computational overhead observed

Effective in detecting soft errors in benchmarks

Abstract

Modern computer scaling trends in pursuit of larger component counts and power efficiency have, unfortunately, lead to less reliable hardware and consequently soft errors escaping into application data ("silent data corruptions"). Techniques to enhance system resilience hinge on the availability of efficient error detectors that have high detection rates, low false positive rates, and lower computational overhead. Unfortunately, efficient detectors to detect faults during address generation (to index large arrays) have not been widely researched. We present a novel lightweight compiler-driven technique called PRESAGE for detecting bit-flips affecting structured address computations. A key insight underlying PRESAGE is that any address computation scheme that flows an already incurred error is better than a scheme that corrupts one particular array access but otherwise (falsely) appears to compute perfectly. Enabling the flow of errors allows one to situate detectors at loop exit points, and helps turn silent corruptions into easily detectable error situations. Our experiments using PolyBench benchmark suite indicate that PRESAGE-based error detectors have a high error-detection rate while incurring low overheads.