A data-centric approach to checksum reuse for array-intensive applications

Soft errors are transient faults that occur in VLSI circuits due to external radiation and affect the logic states of sensitive components. While many systems implement hardware-based protection techniques like ECC and other approaches to ensure an acceptable level of robustness against these errors, such solutions are generally very rigid and costly. Recent research discussed checksum-based software solutions that can be used in the context of array-intensive computations. While a checksum-based scheme can be more flexible than a hardware-based approach to reliability, it can also bring significant runtime overheads. Focusing on array-intensive applications, this paper proposes a compiler-directed data-centric strategy that maximizes reuse of checksums. A unique characteristic of the proposed scheme is that it can work with a given checksum assignment, and automatically - under compiler guidance - restructures the entire application code to maximize checksum reuse. This scheme can reduce checksum recomputing even further by inter-procedural checksum reuse. Our experiments clearly show that the proposed approach reduces the number of checksum calculations required by the previous work.