Using hardware vulnerability factors to enhance AVF analysis

Fault tolerance is now a primary design constraint for all major microprocessors. One step in determining a processor’s compliance to its failure rate target is measuring the Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF) of each on-chip structure. The AVF of a hardware structure is the probability that a fault in the structure will affect the output of a program. While AVF generates meaningful insight into system behavior, it cannot quantify the vulnerability of an individual system component (hardware, user program, etc.), limiting the amount of insight that can be generated. To address this, prior work has introduced the Program Vulnerability Factor (PVF) to quantify the vulnerability of software. In this paper, we introduce and analyze the Hardware Vulnerability Factor (HVF) to quantify the vulnerability of hardware. HVF has three concrete benefits which we examine in this paper. First, HVF analysis can provide insight to hardware designers beyond that gained from AVF analysis alone...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Vilas Sridharan, David R. Kaeli
• Keywords: Architectural Vulnerability Factor, AVF Analysis, Hardware, ISCA 2010, Vulnerability Factor