Dependability Benchmarking of Computing Systems

A Black-Box Approach to Dependability Benchmarking of Computer Hardware Examples of silent data corruption (SDC), induced by intermittent faults, are given. Two techniques, based on environmental tests, are used to detect SDC: an operating temperature and voltage test, and an electrostatic discharge test. Systems under evaluation execute a Linpack benchmark, which checks correctness of the calculations. Advantages of using environmental tools are two fold. i) systems under evaluation are viewed as “black boxes”, i.e. no proprietary data is required. ii) Linpack benchmark is available at no cost.