SymptomTM: Symptom-Based Error Detection and Recovery Using Hardware Transactional Memory

Fault-tolerance has become an essential concern for processor designers due to increasing transient and permanent fault rates. In this study we propose Symptom TM, a symptom-based error detection technique that recovers from errors by leveraging the abort mechanism of Transactional Memory (TM). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first architectural fault-tolerance proposal using Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM). Symptom TM can recover from 86% and 65% of catastrophic failures caused by transient and permanent errors respectively with no performance overhead in error-free executions.