Project-Team ROMA Which Verification for Soft Error Detection?

Abstract: Many methods are available to detect silent errors in high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Each comes with a given cost and recall (fraction of all errors that are actually detected). The main contribution of this paper is to show which detector(s) to use, and to characterize the optimal computational pattern for the application: how many detectors of each type to use, together with the length of the work segment that precedes each of them. We conduct a comprehensive complexity analysis of this optimization problem, showing NP-completeness and designing an FPTAS (Fully Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme). On the practical side, we provide a greedy algorithm whose performance is shown to be close to the optimal for a realistic set of evaluation scenarios. Key-words: fault tolerance, high performance computing, silent data corruption, partial verifica-tion, supercomputer, exascale