Soft-Error-Rate Adaptive Intervals for Low-Overhead Checkpoint Mechanism

Abstract

Soft errors are increasingly important threats to the reliability of integrated circuits. Chips manufactured in advanced technologies show variations in SER caused by variations in the process parameters. Ongoing reduction of feature sizes and complexity of operating environment (temperature, voltage, radiation pressure and so on), SER variation is increasingly manifesting. Checkpoint is one of the most popular recovery method used for many systems, and the intervals of checkpoint can obviously influence performance. However, optimal intervals of checkpoint rely on SER. Theoretically speaking, SER adaptive checkpoint (SACP) which dynamically match checkpoint intervals with real time SER can improve checkpoint overhead under variable SER. But benefits of SACP are relative with SER variation. We give a mathematical model of SER variation and proposal a way to predict SER based errors occurred most currently. Results show high accuracy of SER prediction and much overhead improvement of SACP.