Design and Evaluation of Hybrid Fault-Detection Systems

As chip densities and clock rates increase, processors are becoming more susceptible to transient faults that can affect program correctness. Up to now, system designers have primarily considered hardware-only and softwareonly fault-detection mechanisms to identify and mitigate the deleterious effects of transient faults. These two faultdetection systems, however, are extremes in the design space, representing sharp trade-offs between hardware cost, reliability, and performance. In this paper, we identify hybrid hardware/software fault-detection mechanisms as promising alternatives to hardware-only and software-only systems. These hybrid systems offer designers more options to fit their reliability needs within their hardware and performance budgets. We propose and evaluate CRAFT, a suite of three such hybrid techniques, to illustrate the potential of the hybrid approach. For fair, quantitative comparisons among hardware, software, and hybrid systems, we introduce a new metric, Mean ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: George A. Reis, Jonathan Chang, Neil Vachharajani, Ram Rangan, David I. August, Shubhendu S. Mukherjee
• Keywords: Fault-detection Mechanisms, Hardware, Hybrid Systems, ISCA 2005, Transient Faults