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arXiv · 1206.2132

RepTFD: Replay Based Transient Fault Detection

Lei Li·Tianshi Chen·Yunji Chen·Ling Li·Ruiyang Wu
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Abstract

The advances in IC process make future chip multiprocessors (CMPs) more and more vulnerable to transient faults. To detect transient faults, previous core-level schemes provide redundancy for each core separately. As a result, they may leave transient faults in the uncore parts, which consume over 50% area of a modern CMP, escaped from detection. This paper proposes RepTFD, the first core-level transient fault detection scheme with 100% coverage. Instead of providing redundancy for each core separately, RepTFD provides redundancy for a group of cores as a whole. To be specific, it replays the execution of the checked group of cores on a redundant group of cores. Through comparing the execution results between the two groups of cores, all malignant transient faults can be caught. Moreover, RepTFD adopts a novel pending period based record-replay approach, which can greatly reduce the number of execution orders that need to be enforced in the replay-run. Hence, RepTFD brings only 4.76% performance overhead in comparison to the normal execution without fault-tolerance according to our experiments on the RTL design of an industrial CMP named Godson-3. In addition, RepTFD only consumes about 0.83% area of Godson-3, while needing only trivial modifications to existing components of Godson-3.

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Lei Li, Tianshi Chen, Yunji Chen, Ling Li, Ruiyang Wu. 2012-06-11. RepTFD: Replay Based Transient Fault Detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.2132

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