REFINE: realistic fault injection via compiler-based instrumentation for accuracy, portability and speed

Compiler-based fault injection (FI) has become a popular technique for resilience studies to understand the impact of soft errors in supercomputing systems. Compiler-based FI frameworks inject faults at a high intermediate-representation level. However, they are less accurate than machine code, binary-level FI because they lack access to all dynamic instructions, thus they fail to mimic certain fault manifestations. In this paper, we study the limitations of current practices in compiler-based FI and how they impact the interpretation of results in resilience studies. We propose REFINE, a novel framework that addresses these limitations, performing FI in a compiler backend. Our approach provides the portability and efficiency of compiler-based FI, while keeping accuracy comparable to binary-level FI methods. We demonstrate our approach in 14 HPC programs and show that, due to our unique design, its runtime overhead is significantly smaller than state-of-the-art compiler-based FI frameworks, reducing the time for large FI experiments.