Title
Precise Cache Profiling for Studying Radiation Effects
Abstract
AbstractIncreased access to space has led to an increase in the usage of commodity processors in radiation environments. These processors are vulnerable to transient faults such as single event upsets that may cause bit-flips in processor components. Caches in particular are vulnerable due to their relatively large area, yet are often omitted from fault injection testing because many processors do not provide direct access to cache contents and they are often not fully modeled by simulators. The performance benefits of caches make disabling them undesirable, and the presence of error correcting codes is insufficient to correct for increasingly common multiple bit upsets.This work explores building a program’s cache profile by collecting cache usage information at an instruction granularity via commonly available on-chip debugging interfaces. The profile provides a tighter bound than cache utilization for cache vulnerability estimates (50% for several benchmarks). This can be applied to reduce the number of fault injections required to characterize behavior by at least two-thirds for the benchmarks we examine. The profile enables future work in hardware fault injection for caches that avoids the biases of existing techniques.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3442339
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Cache faults, cache profiling, single event upset
Journal
20
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
1539-9087
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
James Marshall100.34
Robert Gifford231.75
Gedare Bloom36813.95
Gabriel Parmer419018.88
Rahul Simha513712.42