Compiler-Directed Error Resilience for Reliable Computing

Error resilience has become as important as power and performance in modern computing architecture. There are various sources of errors that can paralyze real-world computing systems. Of particular interest to this dissertation are single-event errors. They can be the results of energetic particle strike or abrupt power outage that corrupts the program states leading to system failures. Specifically, energetic particle strike is the major cause of soft error while abrupt power outage can result in memory inconsistency in the nonvolatile memory systems.

Unfortunately, existing techniques to handle those single-event errors are either resource consuming (e.g., hardware approaches) or heavy-weight (e.g., software approaches). To address this problem, this dissertation identifies idempotent processing as an alternative recovery technique to handle the system failures in an efficient and low-cost manner. Then, this dissertation first proposes to design and develop a compiler-directed lightweight methodology which leverages idempotent processing and the state-of-the-art sensor-based detection to achieve soft error resilience at low-cost. This dissertation also introduces a lightweight soft error tolerant hardware design that redefines idempotent processing where the idempotent regions can be created, verified and recovered from the processor's point of view. Furthermore, this dissertation proposes a series of compiler optimizations that significantly reduce the hardware and runtime overhead of the idempotent processing. Lastly, this dissertation proposes a failure-atomic system integrated with idempotent processing to resolve another type of single-event error, i.e., failure-induced memory inconsistency in the nonvolatile memory systems.