Balancing Performance and Reliability in the Memory Hierarchy

Cosmic-ray induced soft errors in cache memories are becoming a major threat to the reliability of microprocessor-based systems. In this paper, we present a new method to accurately estimate the reliability of cache memories. We have measured the MTTF (Mean-Time-ToFailure) of unprotected first-level (L1) caches for twenty programs taken from SPEC2000 benchmark suite. Our results show that a 16 KB first-level cache possesses a MTTF of at least 400 years (for a raw error rate of 0.002 FIT/bit.) However, this MTTF is significantly reduced for higher error rates and larger cache sizes. Our results show that for selected programs, a 64 KB first-level cache is more than 10 times as vulnerable to soft errors versus a 16 KB cache memory. Our work also illustrates that the reliability of cache memories is highly application-dependent. Finally, we present three different techniques to reduce the susceptibility of first-level caches to soft errors by two orders of magnitude. Our analysis sh...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ISPASS
• Authors: Hossein Asadi, Vilas Sridharan, Mehdi Baradaran Tahoori, David R. Kaeli
• Keywords: Cache, Cache Memories, ISPASS 2005, KB first-level Cache, Software Engineering