RECORD: Reducing register traffic for checkpointing in embedded processors

Checkpoint/recovery, as a classic method, has been widely used for overcoming transient faults in computing systems. The basic function of checkpoint/recovery is to save the system states periodically and to restore the system states by using the saved states if a fault occurs. With the hardware-implemented checkpointing mechanism executing at runtime, a processor will have substantially increased register-file reads. For embedded processors, which typically have restricted design constraints on area, power, and performance, such increases might compromise the quality of the application greatly. In this paper, we present a checkpointing method, RECORD, aimed at reducing the resultant register traffic at runtime, by leveraging register data dependencies. The proposed checkpointing method can reduce redundant executions of register-file checkpointing. The experiments show that RECORD achieves improved register traffic reduction (20%) along with reduced dynamic power consumption (approximately 20%) in comparison to the state of the art with minimal area overhead. The leakage power increases marginally (about 2%), but is more than compensated by the decrease in dynamic power.