Future multicore processors will be more susceptible to a variety of hardware failures. In particular, intermittent faults , caused in part by manufacturing, thermal, and voltage variations, can cause bursts of frequent faults that last from several cycles to several seconds or more. Due to practical limitations of circuit techniques, cost-effective reliability will likely require the ability to temporarily suspend execution on a core during periods of intermittent faults. We investigate three of the most obvious techniques for adapting to the dynamically changing resource availability caused by intermittent faults, and demonstrate their different system-level implications. We show that system software reconfiguration has very high overhead, that temporarily pausing execution on a faulty core can lead to cascading livelock, and that using spare cores has high fault-free cost. To remedy these and other drawbacks of the three baseline techniques, we propose using a thin hardware/firmware layer to manage an overcommitted system -- one where the OS is configured to use more virtual processors than the number of currently available physical cores. We show that this proposed technique can gracefully degrade performance during intermittent faults of various duration with low overhead, without involving system software, and without requiring spare cores.
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Adapting to intermittent faults in multicore systems
Wells, Philip M.; Chakraborty, Koushik; Sohi, Gurindar S.
Follow ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
, Volume 36 (1)
Association for Computing Machinery – Mar 25, 2008
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