Energy-efficient fault tolerance in chip multiprocessors using Critical Value Forwarding

Pramod Subramanyan, Virendra Singh, Kewal K. Saluja, Erik Larsson
2010 2010 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems & Networks (DSN)  
Relentless CMOS scaling coupled with lower design toler ances is making ICs increasingly susceptible to wear-out re lated permanent faults and transient faults, necessitating on-chip fault tolerance in future chip microprocessors (CMPs). In this paper we introduce a new energy-efficient fault-tolerant CMP architecture known as Redundant Execution using Critical Value Forwarding (RECVF). RECVF is based on two observations: (i) forwarding critical instruction results from the leading to the
more » ... ng core enables the latter to execute faster, and (ii) this speedup can be exploited to reduce energy consumption by operating the trailing core at a lower voltage-frequency level. Our evaluation shows that RECVF consumes 37% less energy than conventional dual modular redundant (DMR) execution of a program. It consumes only 1.26 times the energy of a non fault-tolerant baseline and has a performance overhead of just 1.2%.
doi:10.1109/dsn.2010.5544918 dblp:conf/dsn/SubramanyanSSL10 fatcat:7n7tkv6jvzb77f7kwzgrtpq6ve