Efficient Fault Tolerance using Intel MPX and TSX

Hardware faults can cause data corruptions during computation, and they are especially harmful if these corruptions happen in data pointers. Existing solutions, however, incur high performance overheads, which is unacceptable for computeintensive applications. In this work, we present an efficient faulttolerance approach against hardware faults by exploiting the new extensions to the x86 architecture. In particular, we propose that Intel MPX can be effectively used to detect faults in data pointers, while Intel TSX can provide roll-back recovery against these corruptions. Our preliminary evaluation supports this hypothesis, and we estimate the average overhead to be roughly around 50%.