Effect of Compiler Optimizations on the Error Resilience of Soft Computing Applications

Anna Thomas, Jacques Clapach and Karthik Pattabiraman, To appear in the ACM International Workshop on Algorithmic and Application Error Resilience (AER), 2013. [ PDF | Talk ]

Abstract: While hardware errors are on the rise as chip sizes reduce, users of commodity systems expect a near faultless experience with low degradation in performance. Developers tune for higher perfor- mance by enabling compiler optimizations on code, but these opti- mizations affect the resilience of applications, making it difficult to maintain an error resilience guarantee when multiple optimizations are applied together (e.g., -O3 in gcc).
We focus on soft computing applications, (e.g., multimedia ap- plications) that can tolerate most hardware errors as long as the erroneous outputs do not deviate significantly from error-free out- comes. We term outcomes that deviate significantly from the error- free outcomes as Egregious Data Corruptions (EDCs). We study how four specific compiler optimizations affect the resilience of soft computing applications. Further, we investigate how the op- timizations affect the detector placement locations for detecting EDC causing faults. This helps us identify safe compiler optimiza- tions that maintain a certain guarantee on the error resilience of the application. Our work is a first step towards identifying the performance-resilience tradeoff space.

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