High Performance Microarchitectural Fault Tolerance

Tuesday March 11, 2003
Hamerschlag Hall 1112
4:30pm

Jared Smolens
Carnegie Mellon University

Designers will soon face microarchitectural challenges keeping processors resistant to transient faults from cosmic rays and alpha particles. Previous work has shown, with a 30% average IPC loss, the feasibility of modifying a superscalar datapath to achieve transient fault detection and recovery.

I will present work in progress showing that program bandwidth requirements vary with time, creating regions where redundant threads simultaneously place high bandwidth demands on the processor. Replication and execution of misspeculated instructions also waste bandwidth and can increase branch resolution latency. By prioritizing one thread and interleaving opposing regions of each thread with a dynamically-allocated slack buffer, dispatch and issue bandwidth demands of the other may be deferred to later, uncontended cycles. Preliminary results of this work will be presented.

Jared Smolens is a first year Ph.D. student in the Computer Architecture Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is advised by Dr. James Hoe. His research interests include multiprocessor and microprocessor architecture, fault tolerance, and performance modeling.