Title
Leverage Redundancy In Hardware Transactional Memory To Improve Cache Reliability
Abstract
Soft error is a type of transient errors that occur due in part to reductions in capacitance and operating voltages in modern electronic components. Recently, the problem of soft errors has become more prevalent due to several design factors, including aggressive device scaling and newer energy-efficient designs, thus significantly threatening the reliability of computer systems. Since the occurrence of soft errors is non-deterministic, detecting them and recovering from them can be quite challenging. A common way to detect soft errors is to execute two identical program instances and then compare their results. Although this approach is effective, it is not efficient as both non-trivial computation and memory resources must be invested to support such redundant executions.The introduction of hardware transactional memory (HTM) in modern chip multiprocessors (CMPs) provides an opportunity to leverage its redundant information to address the emerging reliability concerns including soft errors. In this work, we propose and implement a reliability-enhanced HTM system, called RE-HTM, which leverages redundancy to detect soft errors occurring in the L1 data cache and then recover from them. We then empirically evaluate RE-HTM and the results indicate that RE-HTM is more effective than the existing approach of running two redundant execution instances while incurring lower runtime overhead on protecting L1 data cache from soft errors.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3225058.3225093
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 47TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PARALLEL PROCESSING
Keywords
Field
DocType
Soft errors, transactional memory, cache
Leverage (finance),Soft error,Cache,Computer science,Chip,Transactional memory,Redundancy (engineering),Electronic component,Computation,Distributed computing
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0190-3918
0
0.34
References 
Authors
22
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhichao Yan18210.60
Hong Jiang22137157.96
Witawas Srisa-an329428.67
Sharad C. Seth467193.61
Yujuan Tan513823.48