Communication and Migration Energy Aware Design Space Exploration for Multicore Systems with Intermittent Faults

Abstract

Shrinking transistor geometries, aggressive voltage scaling and higher operating frequencies have negatively impacted the dependability of embedded multicore systems. Most existing research works on fault-tolerance have focused on transient and permanent faults of cores. Intermittent faults are a separate class of defects resulting from on-chip temperature, pressure and voltage variations and lasting for a few cycles to several seconds or more. Operations of cores impacted by intermittent faults are suspended during these cycles but come back alive when conditions become favorable. This paper proposes a technique to model the availability of multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) with intermittent and reparable device defects. This model is based on Markov chain with stochastic fault distribution and can be applied even for permanent faults. Based on this model, a design space pruning technique is proposed to select a set of task mappings (with variable resource usage), which minimizes the task communication energy while satisfying the MPSoC availability constraint. Moreover, task migration overhead is also minimized, which is an important consideration for frequently occurring intermittent and temperature related faults, where prolonged system downtime during task re-mapping is not desired. Experiments conducted with real-life and synthetic application task graphs demonstrate that the proposed technique minimizes communication energy by 30% and reduces migration overhead by 50% as compared to the existing approaches.