Core Failure Mitigation in Integer Sum-of-Product Computations on Cloud Computing Systems

—The decreasing mean-time-to-failure estimates in cloud computing systems indicate that multimedia applications running on such environments should be able to mitigate an increasing number of core failures at runtime. In this paper, we propose a new roll-forward failure-mitigation approach for integer sum-of-product computations, with special emphasis on high-performance generic matrix multiplication (GEMM) and convolution/cross-correlation (CONV) routines. Our approach is based on the production of redundant results within the numerical representation of the outputs via the use of numerical packing. This differs from all existing roll-forward solutions that require a separate set of checksum (or duplicate) results. Our proposal imposes 37.5% reduction in the maximum output bitwidth supported in comparison to integer GEMM or CONV realizations performed on 32-bit integer representations. However, this bitwidth reduction is comparable to the one imposed due to the checksum elements of ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: TMM
• Authors: Ijeoma Anarado, Yiannis Andreopoulos
• Keywords: TMM 2016