ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: Exploiting Inherent Program Redundancy for Fault Tolerance

Technology scaling has led to growing concerns about reliability in micro-processors. Currently, fault tolerance studies rely on creating explicitly redundant execution for fault detection or recovery, which usually involves expensive cost on performance, power, or hardware, etc. In our study, we find exploiting program’s inherent redundancy can better trade off between reliability, performance, and hard-ware cost. This work proposes two approaches to enhance program reliability. The first approach investigates the additional fault resilience at the application level. We explore program correctness definition that views correctness from the application’s standpoint rather than the architecture’s standpoint. Under application-level cor-rectness, multiple numerical outputs can be deemed as correct as long as they are acceptable to users. Thus faults that cause program to produce such outputs can also be tolerated. We find programs which produce inexact and/or approximate outputs can be very resilient at the application level. We call such programs soft computations, and find that they are common in multimedia workloads, as well a