Hamartia: A Fast and Accurate Error Injection Framework

Single bit-flip has been the most popular error model for resilience studies with fault injection. We use RTL gate-level fault injection to show that this model fails to cover many realistic hardware faults. Specifically, single-event transients from combinational logic and single-event upsets in pipeline latches can lead to complex multi-bit errors at the architecture level. However, although accurate, RTL simulation is too slow to evaluate application-level resilience. To strike a balance between model accuracy and injection speed, we refine the concept of hierarchical injection to prune faults with known outcomes, saving 62% of program runs at 2% margin of error on average across 9 benchmark programs. Our implementation of the hierarchical error injector is not only accurate but also fast because it is able to source realistic error patterns using on demand RTL gate-level fault injection. Our tool outperforms state-of-the-art assembly-level and compiler-based error injectors by up to 6X, while providing higher fidelity.