DAFT: Decoupled Acyclic Fault Tolerance

Higher transistor counts, lower voltage levels, and reduced noise margin increase the susceptibility of multicore processors to transient faults. Redundant hardware modules can detect such faults, but software techniques are more appealing for their low cost and flexibility. Recent software proposals have not achieved widespread acceptance because they either increase register pressure, double memory usage, or are too slow in the absence of hardware extensions. This paper presents DAFT, a fast, safe, and memory efficient transient fault detection framework for commodity multicore systems. DAFT replicates computation across multiple cores and schedules fault detection off the critical path. Where possible, values are speculated to be correct and only communicated to the redundant thread at essential program points. DAFT is implemented in the LLVM compiler framework and evaluated using SPEC CPU2000 and SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks on a commodity multicore system. Evaluation results demonstrate that speculation allows DAFT to improves the performance of software redundant multithreading by 2.17× with no degradation of fault coverage.