SDCTune: A model for predicting the SDC proneness of an application for configurable protection

Abstract

Silent Data Corruption (SDC) is a serious reliability issue in many domains, including embedded systems. However, current protection techniques are brittle, and do not allow programmers to trade off performance for SDC coverage. Further, many of them require tens of thousands of fault injection experiments, which are highly time-intensive. In this paper, we propose an empirical model to predict the SDC proneness of a program's data called SDCTune. SDCTune is based on static and dynamic features of the program alone, and does not require fault injections to be performed. We then develop an algorithm using SDCTune to selectively protect the most SDC-prone data in the program subject to a given performance overhead bound. Our results show that our technique is highly accurate at predicting the relative SDC rate of an application, and outperforms full duplication by a factor of 0.83 to 1.87x in efficiency of detection (i.e., ratio of SDC coverage provided to performance overhead)