Two control-flow error recovery methods for multithreaded programs running on multi-core processors

Abstract

In this paper we consider two software-based control-flow error recovery methods with a rollback recovery mechanism for using in multithreaded architectures. Disregarding to thread interactions between different threads by previous CFE recovery techniques caused these methods not be suitable in multithreaded architectures. Furthermore, the high memory and performance overheads of these techniques may be problematic for real-time embedded systems which have tight memory and performance budget. Therefore, regarding to the importance of handling the CFE, unsuitability of the conventional related techniques to be utilized in the modern processors and high memory and performance overheads of previous CFE recovery techniques, two low-cost control-flow error recovery techniques, CFE Recovery using Data-flow graph Consideration (CRDC) and CFE Recovery using Macro block-level Check pointing (CRMC), are presented in this paper. The proposed recovery techniques are composed of two phases of control-flow error detection and control-flow error recovery. These phases are achieved through inserting additional instructions into program at compile time regarding to dependency graph. This graph is extracted to model control-flow and data dependencies among basic blocks and thread interactions between different threads of a program. In order to evaluate the proposed techniques, five multithreaded benchmarks Quick Sort, Matrix Multiplication, Bubble Sort, Linked List and Fast Fourier Transform utilized to run on a multi-core processor, and a total of 5000 transient faults has been injected into several executable points of each program. Fault injection experiments show that tolerable performance and memory overheads with noticeable error recovery coverage can be achieved via proposed techniques.