Reliable and Efficient Parallel Checkpointing Framework for Nonvolatile Processor With Concurrent Peripherals

Abstract

Intermittent systems powered by ambient energy harvesting are becoming popular for the benefits of an infinite lifetime and minimum maintenance requirements. Nonvolatile processors (NVPs) enable continual task executions under an unstable power supply with an efficient reactive checkpointing strategy. However, recovering concurrent peripherals in an intermittent system may incur significant overhead once power failures take place, and the recovery of interrupts also lacks discussion in existing works. Noticing the different optimization directions between responsive checkpointing within NVPs and proactive checkpointing required to recover concurrent peripherals, this paper proposes REMARK, an NVP architecture enabling hybrid checkpointing and efficient peripheral recovery. REMARK expands the current NVP structure with a hybrid backup/restore module, a peripheral handler and an interrupt handler, which addresses the recovery problem of both peripherals and interrupts efficiently. A REMARK chip is fabricated to verify the proposed architecture. Results show that the execution efficiency is improved by <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$13\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> compared with the state-of-the-art. With programming optimization, another 36.5% performance improvement can be achieved.