Characterizing the soft error vulnerability of multicores running multithreaded applications

Multicores have become the platform of choice across all market segments. Cost-effective protection against soft errors is important in these environments, due to the need to move to lower technology generations and the exploding number of transistors on a chip. While multicores offer the flexibility of varying the number of application threads and the number of cores on which they run, the reliability impact of choosing one configuration over another is unclear. Our study reveals that the reliability costs vary dramatically between configurations and being unaware could lead to a sub-optimal choice.