Fingerprinting: Bounding Soft-Error Detection Latency and Bandwidth

Tuesday October 5, 2004
Hamerschlag Hall D-210
4:00 pm

This is a practice talk for the upcoming ASPLOS XI conference in Boston, MA, October 9-13.

Jared Smolens
Carnegie Mellon University

Recent studies have suggested that the soft-error rate in microprocessor logic will become a reliability concern by 2010. This paper proposes an efficient error detection technique, called fingerprinting, that detects differences in execution across a dual modular redundant (DMR) processor pair. Fingerprinting summarizes a processor's execution history in a hash-based signature; differences between two mirrored processors are exposed by comparing their fingerprints. Fingerprinting tightly bounds detection latency and greatly reduces the interprocessor communication bandwidth required for checking. This paper presents a study that evaluates fingerprinting against a range of current approaches to error detection. The result of this study shows that fingerprinting is the only error detection mechanism that simultaneously allows high-error coverage, low error detection bandwidth, and high I/O performance.

Jared Smolens is a third year PhD student in the Computer Architecture Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon, where he is advised by Prof. James Hoe. His time is primarily devoted to the TRUSS project. His research interests include multiprocessor and microprocessor architecture, fault tolerance, and performance modeling.