Studying error propagation on application data structure and hardware

As technology scales, transistors become smaller and aggressive power optimization techniques combined with high operation frequencies and performance-enhancing microarchitectural techniques are employed to achieve increasingly higher performance and power efficiencies. Unfortunately, these developments make the modern systems more vulnerable to soft errors, which are becoming a critical issues in both hardware and software domains. Motivated by this observation, in this work, we propose, implement, and evaluate two error propagation metrics in order to characterize error propagation at both software and hardware levels. The first metric aims to measure error propagation on program data structures, whereas the second one measures the fraction of corrupted locations in the cache memory structure for a given period of time. We evaluate our proposed metrics by performing an empirical study of two application programs using both single-threaded and multi-threaded executions, and varying various experimental parameters such as thread count, error rate, location of errors, and architectural parameters. Our extensive experimental analysis reveals that error propagation over program data structures is highly dependent on application behavior.Further, depending on the cache parameters used, propagation of errors on cache can exhibit different patterns. This paper also discusses how our observed error propagation trends in program data structures and data caches are correlated with each other, focusing in particular on the differences in error propagation speeds in application data structures and data caches.