Evaluating low-cost fault-tolerance mechanism for microprocessors on multimedia applications

We evaluate a low-cost fault-tolerance mechanism for microprocessors, which can detect and recover from transient faults, using multimedia applications. There are two driving forces to study fault-tolerance techniques for microprocessors. One is deep submicron fabrication technologies. Future semiconductor technologies could become more susceptible to alpha particles and other cosmic radiation. The other is the increasing popularity of mobile platforms. Recently cell phones have been used for applications which are critical to our financial security, such as flight ticket reservation, mobile banking, and mobile trading. In such applications, it is expected that computer systems will always work correctly. From these observations, we propose a mechanism which is based on an instruction reissue technique for incorrect data speculation recovery which utilizes time redundancy. Unfortunately, we found significant performance loss when we evaluated the proposal using the SPEC2000 benchmark suite. We evaluate it using MediaBench which contains more practical mobile applications than SPEC2000