Reliability Analysis for Programs with Redundancy Computation for Soft Errors

Abstract

Soft error is one of the factors which may affect the reliability of computer programs. A common method to alleviate the impact of soft errors is redundancy computation, a classical data flow error detection mechanism. However, a program with redundancy computation may still have some vulnerable spots, which might be caused by the flaw during implementation or the instruction reordering given by compiler optimization. Finding the vulnerable spots of a program with redundancy computation is of great significance to evaluate the capability of the error detection mechanism. There are some conventional methods to analyze the reliability of a program under soft errors, such as the irradiation experiment, fault injection, and modeling analysis. However, the irradiation experiment is expensive, fault injection is very time-consuming, and the existing modeling analysis methods have not considered the error detection mechanism. This paper proposes a novel method of reliability analysis for programs with redundancy computation by analyzing the dynamic instruction sequence. Experimental results show that our approach has fairly high accuracy and a false negative rate of about 0.0545.