FIMSIM: A fault injection infrastructure for microarchitectural simulators

Abstract

Fault injection is a widely used approach for experiment-based dependability evaluation. Injecting faults to microarchitectural simulators is particularly appealing for researchers, since it can be utilized at the early design stage of the processor. As such, it enables a preliminary analysis of the correlation between the criticality of processor-structure level faults and their impact on applications. In this study, we present FIMSIM, a compact fault injection infrastructure for microarchitectural simulators which is capable of injecting transient, permanent, intermittent and multi-bit faults. FIMSIM provides the opportunity to comprehensively evaluate the vulnerability of different microarchitectural structures against different fault models.