Compiler-directed lightweight checkpointing for fine-grained guaranteed soft error recovery

Qingrui Liu, Changhee Jung, Dongyoon Lee, Devesh Tiwari

Abstract: This paper presents Bolt, a compiler-directed soft error recovery scheme, that provides fine-grained and guaranteed recovery without excessive performance and hardware overhead. To get rid of expensive hardware support, the compiler protects the architectural inputs during their entire liveness period by safely checkpointing the last updated value in idempotent regions. To minimize the performance overhead, Bolt leverages a novel compiler analysis that eliminates those checkpoints whose value can be reconstructed by other checkpointed values without compromising the recovery guarantee. As a result, Bolt incurs only 4.7% performance overhead on average which is 57% reduction compared to the state-of-the-art scheme that requires expensive hardware support for the same recovery guarantee as Bolt.