Evaluating Application Vulnerability to Soft Errors in Multi-level Cache Hierarchy

As the capacity of caches increases dramatically with new processors, soft errors originating in cache memories has become a major reliability concern for high performance processors. This paper presents application specific soft error vulnerability analysis in order to understand an application’s responses to soft errors from different levels of caches. Based on a high-performance processor simulator called Graphite, we have implemented a fault injection framework that can selectively inject bit flips to different levels of caches. We simulated a wide range of relevant bit error patterns and measured the applications’ vulnerabilities to bit errors. Our experimental results have shown the differing vulnerabilities of applications to bit errors in different levels of caches (e.g. the application failure rate for one program is more than the doulbe of that for another program for a given cache); the results have also indicated the probabilities of different failure behaviors for the given applications.