Automated Derivation of Application-aware Error Detectors using Static Analysis

This paper presents a technique to derive and implement error detectors to protect an application from data errors. The error detectors are derived automatically using compiler-based static analysis from the backward program slice of critical variables in the program. Critical variables are defined as those that are highly sensitive to errors, and deriving error detectors for these variables provides high coverage for errors in any data value used in the program. The error detectors take the form of checking expressions and are optimized for each control flow path followed at runtime. The derived detectors are implemented using a combination of hardware and software. Experiments show that the derived detectors incur low performance overheads while achieving high detection coverage for errors that impact the application.