Aging-Aware Context Switching in Multicore Processors Based on Workload Classification

Abstract

As transistor dimensions continue to shrink, long-term reliability threats, such as Negative Bias Temperature Instability, affect multicore processors lifespan. This letter proposes a load balancing technique, based on the rate of integer and floating-point instructions per workloads. This technique classifies workloads into integer-majority and floating-point-majority classes and migrates workloads among cores in order to relax the stressed execution units. The context switching feature of operating system is employed to reduce implementation and performance overheads of the proposed technique. According to the simulations, the proposed technique reduces the aging rate of a multicore processor by about 35 percent in 10 years of system operation. This is achieved by only 7 percent performance penalty.