Autonomous recovery from a transient hardware failure by executing portions of a stream of program instructions as a transaction. A start of a transaction is created in a stream of program instructions executing on a first processor of a multi-processor computer. A snapshot of a system state information is saved when the transaction begins. When the transaction ends, store data of the transaction is committed. If a transient hardware failure occurs, the transaction is aborted without notifying the computer software application that initiated the stream of program instructions. The transaction is re-executed on a second processor of the multi-processors, based on the saved snapshot of the system state information.