Patent ID: 8448027

Claim:
A computer implemented method for energy-efficient soft error failure detection, the computer implemented method comprising: injecting, in a data processing system, a first simulated soft error to occur during execution of a set of instructions in the data processing system, wherein a soft error is a temporary error condition in which a bit value in a data storage device undergoes a change without a computation causing the change; executing instructions from the set of instructions; identifying, responsive to an output of executing the set of instructions being incorrect, an instruction that was affected by first simulated soft error and led to the incorrect result; recording, that the identified instruction is vulnerable to the first simulated soft error; computing a probability of the identified instruction being vulnerable to a plurality of soft errors, the probability accounting for the vulnerability of the identified instruction to the first simulated soft error; and producing a report, the report including a plurality of probabilities, a probability in the plurality of probabilities corresponding to an instruction in the set of instructions.