LOT-ECC: LOcalized and tiered reliability mechanisms for commodity memory systems

pre-printMemory system reliability is a serious and growing concern in modern servers. Existing chipkill-level mem- ory protection mechanisms suffer from several draw- backs. They activate a large number of chips on ev- ery memory access - this increases energy consump- tion, and reduces performance due to the reduction in rank-level parallelism. Additionally, they increase ac- cess granularity, resulting in wasted bandwidth in the absence of sufficient access locality. They also restrict systems to use narrow-I/O x4 devices, which are known to be less energy-efficient than the wider x8 DRAM de- vices. In this paper, we present LOT-ECC, a local- ized and multi-tiered protection scheme that attempts to solve these problems. We separate error detection and error correction functionality, and employ simple checksum and parity codes effectively to provide strong fault-tolerance, while simultaneously simplifying imple- mentation. Data and codes are localized to the same DRAM row to improve access efficiency. We use sys- tem firmware to store correction codes in DRAM data memory and modify the memory controller to handle data mapping. We thus build an effective fault-tolerance mechanism that provides strong reliability guarantees, activates as few chips as possible (reducing power con- sumption by up to 44.8% and reducing latency by up to 46.9%), and reduces circuit complexity, all while work- ing with commodity DRAMs and operating systems. Fi- nally, we propose the novel concept of a heterogeneous DIMM that enables the extension of LOT-ECC to x16 and wider DRAM parts

LOT-ECC: LOcalized and tiered reliability mechanisms for commodity memory systems

pre-printMemory system reliability is a serious and growing concern in modern servers. Existing chipkill-level mem- ory protection mechanisms suffer from several draw- backs. They activate a large number of chips on ev- ery memory access - this increases energy consump- tion, and reduces performance due to the reduction in rank-level parallelism. Additionally, they increase ac- cess granularity, resulting in wasted bandwidth in the absence of sufficient access locality. They also restrict systems to use narrow-I/O x4 devices, which are known to be less energy-efficient than the wider x8 DRAM de- vices. In this paper, we present LOT-ECC, a local- ized and multi-tiered protection scheme that attempts to solve these problems. We separate error detection and error correction functionality, and employ simple checksum and parity codes effectively to provide strong fault-tolerance, while simultaneously simplifying imple- mentation. Data and codes are localized to the same DRAM row to improve access efficiency. We use sys- tem firmware to store correction codes in DRAM data memory and modify the memory controller to handle data mapping. We thus build an effective fault-tolerance mechanism that provides strong reliability guarantees, activates as few chips as possible (reducing power con- sumption by up to 44.8% and reducing latency by up to 46.9%), and reduces circuit complexity, all while work- ing with commodity DRAMs and operating systems. Fi- nally, we propose the novel concept of a heterogeneous DIMM that enables the extension of LOT-ECC to x16 and wider DRAM parts

ParaDox: Eliminating Voltage Margins via Heterogeneous Fault Tolerance.

Providing reliability is becoming a challenge for chip manufacturers, faced with simultaneously trying to improve miniaturization, performance and energy efficiency. This leads to very large margins on voltage and frequency, designed to avoid errors even in the worst case, along with significant hardware expenditure on eliminating voltage spikes and other forms of transient error, causing considerable inefficiency in power consumption and performance. We flip traditional ideas about reliability and performance around, by exploring the use of error resilience for power and performance gains. ParaMedic is a recent architecture that provides a solution for reliability with low overheads via automatic hardware error recovery. It works by splitting up checking onto many small cores in a heterogeneous multicore system with hardware logging support. However, its design is based on the idea that errors are exceptional. We transform ParaMedic into ParaDox, which shows high performance in both error-intensive and scarce-error scenarios, thus allowing correct execution even when undervolted and overclocked. Evaluation within error-intensive simulation environments confirms the error resilience of ParaDox and the low associated recovery cost. We estimate that compared to a non-resilient system with margins, ParaDox can reduce energy-delay product by 15% through undervolting, while completely recovering from any induced errors

Cross-Layer Early Reliability Evaluation for the Computing cOntinuum

Advanced multifunctional computing systems realized in forthcoming technologies hold the promise of a significant increase of the computational capability that will offer end-users ever improving services and functionalities (e.g., next generation mobile devices, cloud services, etc.). However, the same path that is leading technologies toward these remarkable achievements is also making electronic devices increasingly unreliable, posing a threat to our society that is depending on the ICT in every aspect of human activities. Reliability of electronic systems is therefore a key challenge for the whole ICT technology and must be guaranteed without penalizing or slowing down the characteristics of the final products. CLERECO EU FP7 (GA No. 611404) research project addresses early accurate reliability evaluation and efficient exploitation of reliability at different design phases, since these aspects are two of the most important and challenging tasks toward this goal