Reducing resource redundancy for concurrent error detection techniques in high performance microprocessors

With reducing feature size, increasing chip capacity, and increasing clock speed, microprocessors are becoming increasingly susceptible to transient (soft) errors. Redundant multi-threading (RMT) is an attractive approach for concurrent error detection and recovery. However, redundant threads significantly increase the pressure on the processor resources, resulting in dramatic performance impact. In this paper, we propose reducing resource redundancy as a means to mitigate the performance impact of redundancy. In this approach, all the instructions are redundantly executed, however, the redundant instructions do not use many of the resources used by an instruction. The approach taken to reduce resource redundancy is to exploit the runtime profile of the leading thread to optimally allocate resources to the trailing thread in a staggered RMT architecture. The key observation used in this approach is that, even with a small slack between the two threads, many instructions in the leading thread have already produced their results before their trailing counterparts are renamed. We investigate two techniques in this approach (i) register bits reuse technique that attempts to use the same register (but different bits) for both the copies of the same instruction, if the result produced by the instruction is of small size, and (ii) register value reuse technique that attempts to use the same register for a main instruction and a distinct redundant instruction, if both the instructions produce the same result. These techniques, along with some others, are used to reduce redundancy in register file, reorder buffer, and load/store buffer. The techniques are evaluated in terms of their performance, power, and vulnerability impact on an RMT processor. Our experiments show that the techniques achieve about 95% performance improvement and about 17% energy reduction. The vulnerability of the RMT remains the same with the techniques.

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