Avoiding core's DUE & SDC via acoustic wave detectors and tailored error containment and recovery

The trend of downsizing transistors and operating voltage scaling has made the processor chip more sensitive against radiation phenomena making soft errors an important challenge. New reliability techniques for handling soft errors in the logic and memories that allow meeting the desired failures-in-time (FIT) target are key to keep harnessing the benefits of Moore's law. The failure to scale the soft error rate caused by particle strikes, may soon limit the total number of cores that one may have running at the same time. This paper proposes a light-weight and scalable architecture to eliminate silent data corruption errors (SDC) and detected unrecoverable errors (DUE) of a core. The architecture uses acoustic wave detectors for error detection. We propose to recover by confining the errors in the cache hierarchy, allowing us to deal with the relatively long detection latencies. Our results show that the proposed mechanism protects the whole core (logic, latches and memory arrays) incurring performance overhead as low as 0.60%. © 2014 IEEE.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

I-BEAT: New ultrasonic method for single bunch measurement of ion energy distribution

The shape of a wave carries all information about the spatial and temporal structure of its source, given that the medium and its properties are known. Most modern imaging methods seek to utilize this nature of waves originating from Huygens' principle. We discuss the retrieval of the complete kinetic energy distribution from the acoustic trace that is recorded when a short ion bunch deposits its energy in water. This novel method, which we refer to as Ion-Bunch Energy Acoustic Tracing (I-BEAT), is a generalization of the ionoacoustic approach. Featuring compactness, simple operation, indestructibility and high dynamic ranges in energy and intensity, I-BEAT is a promising approach to meet the needs of petawatt-class laser-based ion accelerators. With its capability of completely monitoring a single, focused proton bunch with prompt readout it, is expected to have particular impact for experiments and applications using ultrashort ion bunches in high flux regimes. We demonstrate its functionality using it with two laser-driven ion sources for quantitative determination of the kinetic energy distribution of single, focused proton bunches.Comment: Paper: 17 Pages, 3 figures Supplementary Material 16 pages, 7 figure

GEO 600 and the GEO-HF upgrade program: successes and challenges

The German-British laser-interferometric gravitational wave detector GEO 600 is in its 14th year of operation since its first lock in 2001. After GEO 600 participated in science runs with other first-generation detectors, a program known as GEO-HF began in 2009. The goal was to improve the detector sensitivity at high frequencies, around 1 kHz and above, with technologically advanced yet minimally invasive upgrades. Simultaneously, the detector would record science quality data in between commissioning activities. As of early 2014, all of the planned upgrades have been carried out and sensitivity improvements of up to a factor of four at the high-frequency end of the observation band have been achieved. Besides science data collection, an experimental program is ongoing with the goal to further improve the sensitivity and evaluate future detector technologies. We summarize the results of the GEO-HF program to date and discuss its successes and challenges

Detector Description and Performance for the First Coincidence Observations between LIGO and GEO

For 17 days in August and September 2002, the LIGO and GEO interferometer gravitational wave detectors were operated in coincidence to produce their first data for scientific analysis. Although the detectors were still far from their design sensitivity levels, the data can be used to place better upper limits on the flux of gravitational waves incident on the earth than previous direct measurements. This paper describes the instruments and the data in some detail, as a companion to analysis papers based on the first data.Comment: 41 pages, 9 figures 17 Sept 03: author list amended, minor editorial change

A Robust Method for Tuning Photoacoustic Gas Detectors

Detection of gases in industrial contexts is of great importance for ensuring safety in storage and transport, so as to limit atmospheric pollution and precisely control industrial and agricultural processes. Although chemical sensors are in widespread use, solid-state infrared detectors for gas sensing promise numerous advantages over conventional catalytic detectors in terms of sensitivity, calibration requirements, and lifetime. The laser-modulation photoacoustic approach is an alternative. Compared to other approaches, it provides more precise measurements with a stable zero baseline, as well as having significantly less complicated optics than cavity ringdown approaches. One enduring problem, though, is the relatively long time required to make photoacoustic measurements. The key contribution of this paper to the industrial context is twofold: first, we show how a sensitive dual-buffer acoustic resonator may be fabricated using 3D printing, and secondly we describe a method for localizing the peak absorption more rapidly than stepping a laser through the gas absorption profile. Modelling of the proposed approach demonstrates its potential, and the expected results are confirmed using an extensive experimental setup for the detection of methane in air

QUANTUM KEY DISTRIBUTION LABORATORY DEMONSTRATION

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a method of secure key distribution which provides protection against the tampering and interception of information. Following the Bennet-Brassard 1984 (BB84) protocol of QKD, we select randomly from a set of bases in which to produce polarized photons and send the photons to a receiver, who measures them in a basis randomly selected from the same set. The fact that quantum mechanics prohibits the exact copying of a photon ensures that any eavesdropper who intercepts, measures, and attempts to pass the photons on to the receiver will be unable to faithfully reproduce that signal. The presence of the eavesdropper can then be detected, prior to any exchange of information, by an examination of the error rate between portions of the keys generated by the sender and receiver. Using a biphoton source, we have constructed a QKD system for use in research towards naval applications.Lieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited