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2005 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'05)
Engineering Over-Clocking: Reliability-Performance Trade-Offs for High-Performance Register Files
Yokohama, Japan
June 28-July 01
ISBN: 0-7695-2282-3
Gokhan Memik, Northwestern University
Masud H. Chowdhury, University of Illinois at Chicago
Arindam Mallik, Northwestern University
Yehea I. Ismail, Northwestern University
Register files are in the critical path of most high-performance processors and their latency is one of the most important factors that limit their size. Our goal is to develop error correction mechanisms at the architecture level. Utilizing this increased robustness, the clock frequencies of the circuits are pushed beyond the point of allowing full voltage swing. This increases the errors observed due to noise and other external factors. The resulting errors are then corrected through the error correction mechanisms. We first develop a realistic model for error probability in register files for a given clock frequency. Then, we present the overall architecture, which allows the error detection computation to be overlapped with other computation in the pipeline. We develop novel techniques that utilize the fact that at a given instance many physical registers are not used in superscalar processors. These underutilized registers are used to store the values of active registers. Our simulation results show that for a fixed architecture the access times to the registers can be reduced by as much as 80% while increasing the number of execution cycles by 0.12%. On the other hand, by reducing the register file access pipeline stages by 75%, the average number of execution cycles of SPEC applications can be reduced by 11.5%.
Index Terms:
Reliability, Fault-Tolerant Computing, Adaptive Systems
Citation:
Gokhan Memik, Masud H. Chowdhury, Arindam Mallik, Yehea I. Ismail, "Engineering Over-Clocking: Reliability-Performance Trade-Offs for High-Performance Register Files," dsn, pp.770-779, 2005 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'05), 2005
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