Core Failure Mitigation in Integer Sum-of-Product Computations on Cloud Computing Systems

Abstract

The decreasing meantime to failure estimates in cloud computing systems indicate that multimedia applications running on such environments should be able to mitigate an increasing number of core failures at runtime. In this paper, we propose a new roll-forward failure-mitigation approach for integer sum-of-product computations, with special emphasis on high-performance generic matrix multiplication (GEMM) and convolution/cross-correlation (CONV) routines. Our approach is based on the production of redundant results within the numerical representation of the outputs via the use of numerical packing. This differs from all existing roll-forward solutions that require a separate set of checksum (or duplicate) results. Our proposal imposes 37.5% reduction in the maximum output bitwidth supported in comparison to integer GEMM or CONV realizations performed on 32-bit integer representations. However, this bitwidth reduction is comparable to the one imposed due to the checksum elements of traditional roll-forward methods, especially for cases where multiple core failures must be mitigated. Experiments with state-of-the-art GEMM and CONV routines running on a c4.8xlarge (shared-memory, 18core) compute-optimized instance of Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2) demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to mitigate up to one quadcore failure while achieving processing throughput that is: (i) comparable to that of the conventional, failure-intolerant, integer GEMM and CONV routines; (ii) substantially superior to that of the equivalent rollforward failure-mitigation method based on checksum streams. Furthermore, when used within an image retrieval framework deployed over a cluster of AWS EC2 spot (i.e., low-cost albeit terminatable) instances, our proposal leads to: (i) 16%-23% cost reduction against the equivalent checksum-based method and (ii) more than 70% cost reduction against conventional failureintolerant processing based on AWS EC2 on-demand (i.e., highercost albeit guaranteed) instances.

A Scalable Approach to Improve Security and Resilience of Smart City IoT Architectures

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