TY - GEN
T1 - Mitigating soft error failures for multimedia applications by selective data protection
AU - Lee, Kyoungwoo
AU - Shrivastava, Aviral
AU - Issenin, Ilya
AU - Dutt, Nikil
AU - Venkatasubramanian, Nalini
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - With advances in process technology, soft errors(SE)are becoming an increasingly critical design concern. Due to their large area and high density, caches are worst hit by soft errors. Although Error Correction Code based mechanisms protect the data in caches, they have high performance and power overheads. Since multimedia applications are increasingly being used in mission-critical embedded systems where both reliability and energy are a major concern, there is a de?nite need to improve reliability in embedded systems, without too much energy overhead. We observe that while a soft error in multimedia data may only result in a minor loss in QoS, a soft error in avariable that controls the execution ?ow of the program may be fatal. Consequently, we propose to partition the data space into failure critical and failure non-critical data, and provide a high-degree of soft error protection only to the failure critical data in Horizontally Partitioned Caches. Experimental results demonstrate that our selective data protection can achieve the failure rate close to that of a soft error protected cache system, while retaining the performance and energy consumption similar to those of a traditional cache system, with some degradation in QoS. For example, for conventional con?guration as in IntelXScale, our approach achieves the same failure rate, while improving performance by 28% and reducing energy consumption by 29%in comparison with a soft error protected cache.
AB - With advances in process technology, soft errors(SE)are becoming an increasingly critical design concern. Due to their large area and high density, caches are worst hit by soft errors. Although Error Correction Code based mechanisms protect the data in caches, they have high performance and power overheads. Since multimedia applications are increasingly being used in mission-critical embedded systems where both reliability and energy are a major concern, there is a de?nite need to improve reliability in embedded systems, without too much energy overhead. We observe that while a soft error in multimedia data may only result in a minor loss in QoS, a soft error in avariable that controls the execution ?ow of the program may be fatal. Consequently, we propose to partition the data space into failure critical and failure non-critical data, and provide a high-degree of soft error protection only to the failure critical data in Horizontally Partitioned Caches. Experimental results demonstrate that our selective data protection can achieve the failure rate close to that of a soft error protected cache system, while retaining the performance and energy consumption similar to those of a traditional cache system, with some degradation in QoS. For example, for conventional con?guration as in IntelXScale, our approach achieves the same failure rate, while improving performance by 28% and reducing energy consumption by 29%in comparison with a soft error protected cache.
KW - Horizontally partitioned caches
KW - Multimedia embedded systems
KW - Selective data protection
KW - Soft errors
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=34547230662&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=34547230662&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1176760.1176810
DO - 10.1145/1176760.1176810
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:34547230662
SN - 1595935436
SN - 9781595935434
T3 - CASES 2006: International Conference on Compilers, Architecture and Synthesis for Embedded Systems
SP - 411
EP - 420
BT - CASES 2006
T2 - CASES 2006: International Conference on Compilers, Architecture and Synthesis for Embedded Systems
Y2 - 22 October 2006 through 25 October 2006
ER -