With the shrinking of technology nodes and the use of parallel processor clusters in hostile and critical environments, such as space, run-time faults caused by radiation are a serious cross-cutting concern, also impacting architectural design. This paper introduces an architectural approach to run-time configurable soft-error tolerance at the core level, augmenting a six-core open-source RISC-V cluster with a novel On-Demand Redundancy Grouping (ODRG) scheme. ODRG allows the cluster to operate either as two fault-tolerant cores, or six individual cores for high-performance, with limited overhead to switch between these modes during run-time. The ODRG unit adds less than 11% of a core's area for a three-core group, or a total of 1% of the cluster area, and shows negligible timing increase, which compares favorably to a commercial state-of-the-art implementation, and is 2.5× faster in fault recovery re-synchronization. Furthermore, when redundancy is not necessary, the ODRG approach allows the redundant cores to be used for independent computation, allowing up to 2.96× increase in performance for selected applications.
On-Demand Redundancy Grouping: Selectable Soft-Error Tolerance for a Multicore Cluster / Rogenmoser M.; Wistoff N.; Vogel P.; Gurkaynak F.; Benini L.. - ELETTRONICO. - 2022-July:(2022), pp. 398-401. (Intervento presentato al convegno 2022 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI) tenutosi a Nicosia, Cyprus nel 04-06 July 2022) [10.1109/ISVLSI54635.2022.00089].
On-Demand Redundancy Grouping: Selectable Soft-Error Tolerance for a Multicore Cluster
Benini L.
2022
Abstract
With the shrinking of technology nodes and the use of parallel processor clusters in hostile and critical environments, such as space, run-time faults caused by radiation are a serious cross-cutting concern, also impacting architectural design. This paper introduces an architectural approach to run-time configurable soft-error tolerance at the core level, augmenting a six-core open-source RISC-V cluster with a novel On-Demand Redundancy Grouping (ODRG) scheme. ODRG allows the cluster to operate either as two fault-tolerant cores, or six individual cores for high-performance, with limited overhead to switch between these modes during run-time. The ODRG unit adds less than 11% of a core's area for a three-core group, or a total of 1% of the cluster area, and shows negligible timing increase, which compares favorably to a commercial state-of-the-art implementation, and is 2.5× faster in fault recovery re-synchronization. Furthermore, when redundancy is not necessary, the ODRG approach allows the redundant cores to be used for independent computation, allowing up to 2.96× increase in performance for selected applications.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
