Eliminating microarchitectural dependency from Architectural Vulnerability

The Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF) of a hardware structure is the probability that a fault in the structure will affect the output of a program. AVF captures both microarchitectural and architectural fault masking effects; therefore, AVF measurements cannot generate insight into the vulnerability of software independent of hardware. To evaluate the behavior of software in the presence of hardware faults, we must isolate the software-dependent (architecture-level masking) portion of AVF from the hardware-dependent (microarchitecture-level masking) portion, providing a quantitative basis to make reliability decisions about software independent of hardware. In this work, we demonstrate that the new Program Vulnerability Factor (PVF) metric provides such a basis: PVF captures the architecture-level fault masking inherent in a program, allowing software designers to make quantitative statements about a program's tolerance to soft errors. PVF can also explain the AVF behavior...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Vilas Sridharan, David R. Kaeli
• Keywords: AVF Behavior, Computer Architecture, Fault Masking Effects, HPCA 2009, Program Vulnerability Factor