Transient faults due to particle strikes are a key challenge in microprocessor design. Driven by exponentially increasing transistor counts, per-chip faults are a growing burden. To protect against soft errors, redundancy techniques such as redundant multithreading (RMT) are often used. However, these techniques assume that the probability that a structural fault will result in a soft error (i.e., the Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF)) is 100 percent, unnecessarily draining processor resources. Due to the high cost of redundancy, there have been efforts to throttle RMT at runtime. To date, these methods have not incorporated an AVF model and therefore tend to be ad hoc. Unfortunately, computing the AVF of complex microprocessor structures (e.g., the ISQ) can be quite involved.

To provide probabilistic guarantees about fault tolerance, we have created a rigorous characterization of AVF behavior that can be easily implemented in hardware. We experimentally demonstrate AVF variability within and across the SPEC2000 benchmarks and identify strong correlations between structural AVF values and a small set of processor metrics. Using these simple indicators as predictors, we create a proof-of-concept RMT implementation that demonstrates that AVF prediction can be used to maintain a low fault tolerance level without significant performance impact.

Technical Report:

Kristen R. Walcott, Greg Humphreys, and Sudhanva Gurumurthi. Dynamic Prediction of Architectural Vulnerability from Microarchitectural State. CS-2007-05. Department of Computer Science. University of Virginia, November 2006.
[PDF] [BibTeX Entry]