Analyzing the impact of using pthreads versus OpenMP under fault injection in ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core

This paper presents an analysis of the occurrence of software errors at parallel applications using POSIX Threads (Pthreads) versus their OpenMP counterparts and sequential versions. All cases were tested at the ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor that is embedded in many commercial SoC available in the market. The OVP simulator platform is used to instantiate the processor model and a fault injection platform injects faults in the system during simulation. We analyze the effect of bit-flips in the registers in both ARM cores during the execution of sequential and parallel versions of the same applications. We then use the fault injection results to analyze the error rate and their causes. Results show that different parallelization algorithms can have different error rates, and that there is a tendency on parallel applications to have more silent data corruption errors than their sequential counterparts when exposed to faults. The results also show a general tendency for Pthreads applications to be more susceptible to silent data corruption errors than their OpenMP counterparts.