POSTER: Fault-tolerant Execution on COTS Multi-core Processors with Hardware Transactional Memory Support

Software-based fault-tolerance mechanisms can increase the reliability of multi-core CPUs while being cheaper and more flexible than hardware solutions like lockstep architectures. However, checkpoint creation, error detection and correction entail high performance overhead if implemented in software. We propose a software/hardware hybrid approach, which leverages Intel's hardware transactional memory (TSX) to support implicit checkpoint creation and fast rollback. Hardware enhancements are proposed and evaluated, leading to a resulting performance overhead of 19% on average.