A study of the impact of single bit-flip and double bit-flip errors on program execution

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an extensive experimental study of bit-flip errors in instruction set architecture registers and main memory locations. Comprising more than two million fault injection experiments conducted with thirteen benchmark programs, the study provides insights on whether it is necessary to consider double bit-flip errors in dependability benchmarking experiments. The results show that the proportion of silent data corruptions in the program output, is almost the same for single and double bit errors. In addition, we present detailed statistics about the error sensitivity of different target registers and memory locations, including bit positions within registers and memory words. These show that the error sensitivity varies significantly between different bit positions and registers. An important observation is that injections in certain bit positions always have the same impact regardless of when the error is injected. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.