FastFlip: Compositional Error Injection Analysis

Instruction-level error injection analyses aim to find instructions where errors often lead to unacceptable outcomes like Silent Data Corruptions (SDCs). These analyses require significant time, which is especially problematic if developers wish to regularly analyze software that evolves over time. We present FastFlip, a combination of empirical error injection and symbolic SDC propagation analyses that enables fast, compositional error injection analysis of evolving programs. FastFlip calculates how SDCs propagate across program sections and correctly accounts for unexpected side effects that can occur due to errors. Using FastFlip, we analyze five benchmarks, plus two modified versions of each benchmark. FastFlip speeds up the analysis of incrementally modified programs by 3.2× (geomean). FastFlip selects a set of instructions to protect against SDCs that minimizes the runtime cost of protection while protecting against a developer-specified target fraction of all SDC-causing errors.