Towards Resiliency Evaluation of Vector Programs

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Abstract

The systems resilience research community has developed methods to manually insert additional source-programlevel assertions to trap errors, and also devised tools to conductfault injection studies for scalar program codes. In this work, we contribute the first vector oriented LLVM-level fault injectorVULFI to help study the effects of faults in vector architecturesthat are of growing importance, especially for vectorizing loops. Using VULFI, we conduct a resiliency study of nine real-worldvector benchmarks using Intel's AVX and SSE extensions asthe target vector instruction sets, and offer the first reportedunderstanding of how faults affect vector instruction sets. We takethis work further toward automating the insertion of resilienceassertions during compilation. This is based on our observationthat during intermediate (e.g., LLVM-level) code generation tohandle full and partial vectorization, modern compilers exploit(and explicate in their code-documentation) critical invariants. These invariants are turned into error-checking code. We confirmthe efficacy of these automatically inserted low-overhead errordetectors for vectorized for loops.