Tolerating Soft Errors in Processor Cores Using CLEAR (Cross-Layer Exploration for Architecting Resilience)

TL;DR

This paper introduces CLEAR, a framework that systematically explores and optimizes cross-layer resilience techniques to protect processor cores from soft errors with minimal cost, achieving significant reliability improvements.

Contribution

The paper presents the first systematic exploration of cross-layer resilience techniques for soft error tolerance in processor cores, optimizing combinations for cost-effectiveness.

Findings

A combination of circuit hardening, parity checking, and recovery yields high resilience at low cost.

Selective circuit hardening guided by application analysis provides a cost-effective solution.

Achieves 50x silent data corruption rate improvement with minimal energy overhead.

Abstract

We present CLEAR (Cross-Layer Exploration for Architecting Resilience), a first of its kind framework which overcomes a major challenge in the design of digital systems that are resilient to reliability failures: achieve desired resilience targets at minimal costs (energy, power, execution time, area) by combining resilience techniques across various layers of the system stack (circuit, logic, architecture, software, algorithm). This is also referred to as cross-layer resilience. In this paper, we focus on radiation-induced soft errors in processor cores. We address both single-event upsets (SEUs) and single-event multiple upsets (SEMUs) in terrestrial environments. Our framework automatically and systematically explores the large space of comprehensive resilience techniques and their combinations across various layers of the system stack (586 cross-layer combinations in this paper), derives cost-effective solutions that achieve resilience targets at minimal costs, and provides guidelines for the design of new resilience techniques. Our results demonstrate that a carefully optimized combination of circuit-level hardening, logic-level parity checking, and micro-architectural recovery provides a highly cost-effective soft error resilience solution for general-purpose processor cores. For example, a 50x improvement in silent data corruption rate is achieved at only 2.1% energy cost for an out-of-order core (6.1% for an in-order core) with no speed impact. However, (application-aware) selective circuit-level hardening alone, guided by a thorough analysis of the effects of soft errors on application benchmarks, provides a cost-effective soft error resilience solution as well (with ~1% additional energy cost for a 50x improvement in silent data corruption rate).