Title
Exploiting Idle Hardware to Provide Low Overhead Fault Tolerance for VLIW Processors
Abstract
Because of technology scaling, the soft error rate has been increasing in digital circuits, which affects system reliability. Therefore, modern processors, including VLIW architectures, must have means to mitigate such effects to guarantee reliable computing. In this scenario, our work proposes three low overhead fault tolerance approaches based on instruction duplication with zero latency detection, which uses a rollback mechanism to correct soft errors in the pipelanes of a configurable VLIW processor. The first uses idle issue slots within a period of time to execute extra instructions considering distinct application phases. The second works at a finer grain, adaptively exploiting idle functional units at run-time. However, some applications present high instruction-level parallelism (ILP), so the ability to provide fault tolerance is reduced: less functional units will be idle, decreasing the number of potential duplicated instructions. The third approach attacks this issue by dynamically reducing ILP according to a configurable threshold, increasing fault tolerance at the cost of performance. While the first two approaches achieve significant fault coverage with minimal area and power overhead for applications with low ILP, the latter improves fault tolerance with low performance degradation. All approaches are evaluated considering area, performance, power dissipation, and error coverage.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/3001935
ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems (JETC) - Special Issue on Nanoelectronic Circuit and System Design Methods for the Mobile Computing Era and Regular Papers
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Fault tolerance,VLIW,soft errors,adaptive processor
Journal
13
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
1550-4832
9
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.66
30
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anderson Luiz Sartor1317.67
Arthur Francisco Lorenzon2469.07
Luigi Carro31393166.42
Fernanda Lima Kastensmidt455461.82
Stephan Wong511912.80
Antonio C. Beck611732.17