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IEEEPACT
2007
IEEE

Unified Architectural Support for Soft-Error Protection or Software Bug Detection

13 years 10 months ago
Unified Architectural Support for Soft-Error Protection or Software Bug Detection
In this paper we propose a unified architectural support that can be used flexibly for either soft-error protection or software bug detection. Our approach is based on dynamically detecting and enforcing instructionlevel invariants. A hardware table is designed to keep track of run-time invariant information. During program execution, instructions access this table and compare their produced results against the stored invariants. Any violation of the predicted invariant suggests a potential abnormal behavior, which could be a result of a soft error or a latent software bug. In case of a soft error, monitoring invariant violations provides opportunistic soft-error protection to multiple structures in processor pipelines. Our experimental results show that invariant violations detect soft errors promptly and as a result, simple pipeline squashing is able to fix most of the detected soft errors. Meanwhile, the same approach can be easily adapted for software bug detection. The proposed a...
Martin Dimitrov, Huiyang Zhou
Added 03 Jun 2010
Updated 03 Jun 2010
Type Conference
Year 2007
Where IEEEPACT
Authors Martin Dimitrov, Huiyang Zhou
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