Survey of Error and Fault Detection Mechanisms

This report describes diverse error detection mechanisms that can be utilized within a resilient system to protect applications against various types of errors and faults, both hard and soft. These detection mechanisms have different overhead costs in terms of energy, performance, and area, and also differ in their error coverage, complexity, and programmer effort. In order to achieve the highest efficiency in designing and running a resilient computer system, one must understand the trade-offs among the aforementioned metrics for each detection mechanism and choose the most efficient option for a given running environment. To accomplish such a goal, we first enumerate many error detection techniques previously suggested in the literature.