Evaluation of Compilers Effects on OpenMP Soft Error Resiliency

Abstract

Software engineers are using different compilers and parallel programming models (e.g., Pthreads, OpenMP) to take the best performance offered by multicore systems. Both programming models and compilers have specific characteristics, which directly impact on applications code footprint, performance, power-efficiency and reliability. The occurrence of soft errors in multicore systems is a growing reliability issue in several domains (e.g., automotive, medical, avionics). In this scenario, this paper investigates the impact of widely adopted compilers on the soft error reliability of applications implemented with OpenMP library. Fault injection campaigns consider 3 open-source compilers (GNU/GCC 5.5.0, 7.3.1, Clang 6.0.1), 16 OpenMP benchmarks executing on single, dual and quad-core versions of the Arm Cortex-A72 processor. Results show that, on average, Clang is 15.85% more reliable than both versions of GCC, which demonstrate to be more sensitive to the optimisation flags when compared to Clang.