ANB- and ANBDmem-Encoding: Detecting Hardware Errors in Software

Abstract

Abstract. It is expected that commodity hardware is becoming less reliable because of the continuously decreasing feature sizes of integrated circuits. Nevertheless, more and more commodity hardware with insufficient error detection is used in critical applications. One possible solution is to detect hardware errors in software using arithmetic AN-codes. These codes detect hardware errors independent of the actual failure modes of the underlying hardware. However, measurements have shown that AN-codes still exhibit large rates of undetected silent data corruptions (SDC). These high rates of undetected SDCs are caused by the insufficient protection of control and data flow through AN-codes. In contrast, ANB-and ANBD-codes promise much higher error detection rates because they also detect errors in control and data flow. We present our encoding compiler that automatically applies either an AN-, ANBor ANBD-code to an application. Our error injections show that AN-, ANB-, and ANBD-codes successfully detect errors and more important that indeed ANB-and ANBD-codes reduce the SDC rate more effectively than AN-codes. The difference between ANBD-and ANB-codes is also visible but less pronounced.

Combining Error Detection and Transactional Memory for Energy-Efficient Computing below Safe Operation Margins

“…The level of error detection that can be achieved using encoded processing depends on the selected type of arithmetic code, e.g., AN codes can detect value errors while ANBDmem codes [28] can additionally detect lost updates in memory, but at the expense of a higher processing overhead [29]. The observed rate of undetected errors is 9% and 0.5%, respectively.…”

An efficient adaptive software-implemented technique to detect control-flow errors in multi-core architectures

“…At the end of the BBs, the content of the counter is compared with the pre-calculated (expected) value to detect Type 2 CFEs. Also, ANB and ANBD [25] are based-on instruction replication to detect application data errors, arisen due to the occurrence of the Type 2 CFEs. Using these ideas will lead to the enhanced detection coverage of Type 2 CFEs.…”

dOSEK: the design and implementation of a dependability-oriented static embedded kernel

“…The concept of AN-encoding has been known for quite a while [12]; it has been taken up in recent years in compilerand interpreter-based solutions [29], [35]. Yet, these generic realizations are not practicable for realizing a RCB -not only due their immense run time overhead of a factor of 10 3 up to 10 5 , but also due to the specific nature of low-level system software.…”