Replica victim caching to improve cache reliability against transient errors

Authors:
Wei Zhang
Affiliations:
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA
Venue:
International Journal of High Performance Systems Architecture
Year:
2010

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Abstract

Future cache memories must deal with soft errors to ensure data reliability. This paper investigates the addition of a small cache – replica victim cache, to accommodate the replicas that are frequently evicted from the L1 data cache due to in-cache replication (ICR) for further enhancing the data reliability against soft errors. Our experimental results reveal that a replica victim cache with only four entries can increase the reliability of the L1 data cache by 21.7% more than ICR without impacting performance significantly. Also, the area overhead is less than 10% for most L1 data cache configurations. We believe the proposed scheme provides an interesting cache design option, especially for the applications that are operated in highly noisy environments or demand very high data integrity.