Maestro: Orchestrating Lifetime Reliability in Chip Multiprocessors

As CMOS feature sizes venture deep into the nanometer regime, wearout mechanisms including negative-bias temperature instability and timedependent dielectric breakdown can severely reduce processor operating lifetimes and performance. This paper presents an introspective reliability management system, Maestro, to tackle reliability challenges in future chip multiprocessors (CMPs) head-on. Unlike traditional approaches, Maestro relies on low-level sensors to monitor the CMP as it ages (introspection). Leveraging this real-time assessment of CMP health, runtime heuristics identify wearout-centric job assignments (management). By exploiting the complementary effects of the natural heterogeneity (due to process variation and wearout) that exists in CMPs and the diversity found in system workloads, Maestro composes job schedules that intelligently control the aging process. Monte Carlo experiments show that Maestro significantly enhances lifetime reliability through intelligent wear-leveli...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: HiPEAC
• Authors: Shuguang Feng, Shantanu Gupta, Amin Ansari, Scott A. Mahlke
• Keywords: HiPEAC 2010, Introspective Reliability Management, Lifetime Reliability, Process Variation, System Software