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Selective Replication : A Lightweight Technique for Soft Errors. Xavier Vera, Jaume Abella ,Javier Carretero and Antonio Gonzalez. Outline of Presentation. Introduction Soft Errors Selective Replication Technique Implementation of Selective Replication
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Selective Replication : A Lightweight Technique for Soft Errors Xavier Vera, JaumeAbella ,Javier Carreteroand Antonio Gonzalez
Outline of Presentation • Introduction • Soft Errors • Selective Replication Technique • Implementation of Selective Replication • Coverage and Results of Selective Replication • Related work • Conclusion
Introduction • Cause for Soft Errors • Why name soft error? • Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) • Failure In Time (FIT)
Introduction • Which structures to protect • FIT(i) = RawErrorRate × TVF × AVFw(i) • Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF) • Architecturally Correct Execution (ACE)
Soft Errors • Scaling of the SER Problem • SER Processor • Implementation of the SMT Processor
Selective Replication Technique • What is Selective Replication? • Protecting the Frontend - Map table and free list protection - Logic protection • Protecting the Backend
Selective Replication Technique • Instruction Vs Vulnerability [minAVF + (maxAVF − minAVF)/25× (i − 1), minAVF + (maxAVF − minAVF)/25× i] • Implementing the Vulnerability Threshold
Implementation of Selective Replication • widened ROB Validation • Selective Queue • Priority Selection (P-Sel)
Implementation of Selective Replication • Commit • Branch Misprediction • Vulnerability of the Added Hardware
Coverage and Results of Selective Replication • Functional units are protected • Logic in charge of performing the computation • Latches protected by reexecution • ROB,AGUs are not protected
Coverage and Results of Selective Replication • FIT reduction • Performance slowdown • Power and Area overhead
Coverage and Results of Selective Replication • SQ Size • Vulnerability Threshold • QoS
Related Work • Replicating register values into unused registers • Reis proposed Replicating instructions at the compiler level • IBM G5 replicates the frontend and the execution engine
Conclusion • Article presents a new approach to improve the reliability of modern processors by selectively replicating the most vulnerable instructions • Achieved 60% FIT reduction with less than 4% performance degradation with small area and complexity overhead