One Bit is (Not) Enough: An Empirical Study of the Impact of Single and Multiple Bit-Flip Errors
Paper in proceeding, 2017

Recent studies have shown that technology and voltage scaling are expected to increase the likelihood that particle-induced soft errors manifest as multiple-bit errors. This raises concerns about the validity of using single bit-flips for assessing the impact of soft errors in fault injection experiments. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether multiple-bit errors could cause a higher percentage of silent data corruptions (SDCs) compared to single-bit errors. Based on 2700 fault injection campaigns with 15 benchmark programs, featuring a total of 27 million experiments, our results show that single-bit errors in most cases yields a higher percentage of SDCs compared to multiple-bit errors. However, in 8% of the campaigns we observed a higher percentage of SDCs for multiple-bit errors. For most of these campaigns, the highest percentage of SDCs was obtained by flipping at most 3 bits. Moreover, we propose three ways of pruning the error space based on the results.

error space pruning

single/multiple bit-flip errors

transient hardware faults

fault injection

Author

Behrooz Sangchoolie

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Karthik Pattabiraman

University of British Columbia (UBC)

Johan Karlsson

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

The 47th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks

97-108 8023114
978-1-5386-0541-7 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Computer Engineering

DOI

10.1109/DSN.2017.30

ISBN

978-1-5386-0541-7

More information

Latest update

3/29/2018