Nithin Nakka, Karthik Pattabiraman, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk and Ravishankar Iyer, Workshop on Silicon Errors in Logic- System Effects (SELSE), 2006.
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This paper is superceded by the following conference paper.
Abstract: Even though replication has been widely used in providing fault tolerance, the underlying hardware is unaware of the application executing on it. The application cannot choose to use redundancy for a specific code section and run in a normal, unreplicated mode for the rest of the code. In this paper we propose Processor-level Selective Replication, a mechanism to dynamically configure the degree of instruction-level replication according to the applications demands. The application can choose to replicate only code sections that are critical to its crash-free execution. This decreases the impact on the performance. It is also known that many of the processor-level faults do not lead to failures observable in the application outcome. So, selective replication also decreases the number of false positives.
