Dynamic Prediction of Architectural Vulnerability from Microarchitectural State Abstract.pdfVIP

Dynamic Prediction of Architectural Vulnerability from Microarchitectural State Kristen R. Walcott Greg Humphreys Sudhanva Gurumurthi walcott@ humper@ gurumurthi@ Department of Computer Science University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 Abstract to transient faults from external charged particles, such as Transient faults due to particle strikes are a key challenge high-energy neutrons from terrestrial cosmic rays or alpha in microprocessor design. Driven by exponentially increas- particles from chip packaging [35]. These faults can lead to ing transistor counts, per-chip faults are a growing burden. spurious bit flips, which may propagate to the architected To protect against soft errors, redundancy techniques such state and lead to incorrect program execution. Although as redundant multithreading (RMT) are often used. How- traditionally considered a problem only for large memory ever, these techniques assume that the probability that a structures (e.g., caches and main memory), transient faults structural fault will result in a soft error (i.e., the Archi- are becoming a serious problem even for the latches and tectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF)) is 100 percent, unnec- combinational logic within the processor core [28]. essarily draining processor resources. Due to the high cost Techniques for protecti