Benchmarking the Hardware Error Sensitivity of Machine Instructions

Paper in proceeding, 2013

This paper presents the results of an extensive fault injection study of the impact of processor faults that manifest as bit flip errors in instruction set architecture registers and main memory locations. The aim is to investigate if bit errors that propagate to the source registers or memory locations of a given class of machine instructions have a similar probability of generating undetected value failures (i.e., silent data corruptions) for different programs. The results show a fairly large variation in the error sensitivity over different programs for all classes of machine instructions, which indicates that the effectiveness of error mitigation techniques that target specific machine instructions may vary significantly for different programs.