An end-to-end approach for the automatic derivation of application-aware error detectors

Abstract

Critical Variable Recomputation (CVR) based error detection provides high coverage for data critical to an application while reducing the performance overhead associated with detecting benign errors. However, when implemented exclusively in software, the performance penalty associated with CVR based detection is unsuitably high. This paper addresses this limitation by providing a hybrid hardware/software tool chain which allows for the design of efficient error detectors while minimizing additional hardware. Detection mechanisms are automatically derived during compilation and mapped onto hardware where they are executed in parallel with the original task at runtime. When tested using an FPGA platform, results show that our approach incurs an area overhead of 53% while increasing execution time by 27% on average.