Device View Redundancy: An Adaptive Low-Overhead Fault Tolerance Mechanism for Many-Core System

Abstract

Continued increasing of fault rate in integrate circuit makes processors more susceptible to errors, especially many-core processor. Meanwhile, most systems or applications do not need full fault coverage, which has excessive overhead. So on-demand fault tolerance is desired for these applications. In this paper, we propose an adaptive low-overhead fault tolerance mechanism for many-core system, called Device View Redundancy (DVR). It treats fault tolerance as a device that can be configured and used by application when high reliability is needed. Nevertheless, DVR exploits the idle resources for lowoverhead fault tolerance, which is based on the observation that the utilization of many-core system is low due to lack of parallelism in application. Finally, the experiment shows that the performance overhead of DVR is reduced by 16%to 98% compared with full Dual Modular Redundancy (DMR).