Deploying Lightweight Input-Aware Selective Instruction Duplication in HPC Applications

Modern high-performance computing (HPC) applications are increasingly vulnerable to silent data corruptions (SDCs) caused by transient hardware faults. While selective instruction duplication (SID) offers an efficient software-level protection strategy, existing SID methods rely on SDC vulnerability profile derived from only the default reference input often found in application suites. However, they overlook the input-dependent nature of SDC propagation. This leads to significant SDC coverage loss when inputs vary. We present Protego, a novel input-aware SID protection framework that efficiently adapts protection to runtime inputs. Protego performs a one-time vulnerability-guided input exploration to identify a small number of input groups with distinct SID protection patterns. At runtime, Protego uses lightweight features derived from input arguments to select and deploy the appropriate SID protection. Our evaluation across 10 HPC applications demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of Protego in mitigating SDC coverage loss across diverse inputs, compared to existing SID techniques.