Abstract
The demand for fault-tolerant execution on high performance computer systems increases due to higher fault rates resulting from smaller structure sizes. As an alternative to hardware-based lockstep solutions, software-based fault-tolerance mechanisms can increase the reliability of multi-core commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) CPUs while being cheaper and more flexible. This paper proposes a software/hardware hybrid approach, which targets Intel’s current x86 multi-core platforms of the Core and Xeon family. We leverage hardware transactional memory (Intel TSX) to support implicit checkpoint creation and fast rollback. Redundant execution of processes and signature-based comparison of their computations provides error detection, and transactional wrapping enables error recovery. Existing applications are enhanced towards fault-tolerant redundant execution by post-link binary instrumentation. Hardware enhancements to further increase the applicability of the approach are proposed and evaluated with SPEC CPU 2006 benchmarks. The resulting performance overhead is 47% on average, assuming the existence of the proposed hardware support.
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Haas, F., Weis, S., Ungerer, T., Pokam, G., Wu, Y. (2017). Fault-Tolerant Execution on COTS Multi-core Processors with Hardware Transactional Memory Support. In: Knoop, J., Karl, W., Schulz, M., Inoue, K., Pionteck, T. (eds) Architecture of Computing Systems - ARCS 2017. ARCS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10172. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54999-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54999-6_2
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