Publication
SC 2016
Conference paper

FlipBack: Automatic Targeted Protection against Silent Data Corruption

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Abstract

The decreasing size of transistors has been critical to the increase in capacity of supercomputers. The smaller the transistors are, less energy is required to flip a bit, and thus silent data corruptions (SDCs) become more common. In this paper, we present FlipBack, an automatic software-based approach that protects applications from SDCs. FlipBack provides targeted protection for different types of data and calculations based on their characteristics. It leverages compile-time analysis and program markup to identify data critical for control flow and enables selective replication of computation by the runtime system. We evaluate FlipBack with various HPC mini-applications that capture the behavior of real scientific applications and show that FlipBack is able to protect applications from most silent data corruptions with only 6-20% performance degradation.

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Publication

SC 2016

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