An Investigation of the Impact of Double Bit-Flip Error Variants on Program Execution

The objective of this paper is to investigate two existing variants of the double bit-flip error models and their impact on program execution. The two variants are (i) flipping two bits in a given word or register and (ii) flipping one bit in two different words or registers. The goal of the study is to determine whether there is relevance for consideration for both variants during program validation. Specifically, we seek to determine if the profile failures induced on software by the variants are different. This then motivates that both are needed for validation. We conduct a large-scale experiment on five different software systems from two target systems. Our results show that each variant induces a different failure profile in software. Hence, we conclude that both variants are important during validation.