Automated Algorithmic Error Resilience Based on Outlier Detection
Amoghavarsha Suresh, John Sartori · IEEE Micro · 2015
The authors propose automated algorithmic error resilience based on outlier detection. The approach exploits characteristic behavior of a class of applications to create metric functions that normally produce values according to a designed distribution or behavior and produce outlier values when computations are affected by errors. For a robust algorithm that employs such an approach, error detection becomes equivalent to outlier detection. As such, the authors use well-established, statistically rigorous techniques for outlier detection to effectively and efficiently detect errors, and subsequently correct them. The authors' error-resilient algorithms incur significantly lower overhead than traditional hardware and software error-resilience techniques (such as triple modular redundancy). In addition, compared to previous approaches to application-based error resilience, the authors' approaches parameterize the robustification process, making it easy to automatically transform large classes of applications into robust applications with the use of parser-based tools and minimal programmer effort. They demonstrate the use of automated error resilience based on outlier detection for dynamic programming problems. For error rates up to 10E-3, the error-resilient algorithms achieve the same output quality as their error-free counterparts with significantly lower overhead (less than 59 percent for monadic problems and 263 percent for polyadic problems, on average) than conventional hardware and software error-resilience techniques.