ERSA: error resilient system architecture for probabilistic applications

  • Authors:

  • Larkhoon Leem;Hyungmin Cho;Jason Bau;Quinn A. Jacobson;Subhasish Mitra

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

There is a growing concern about the increasing vulnerability of future computing systems to errors in the underlying hardware. Traditional redundancy techniques are expensive for designing energy-efficient systems that are resilient to high error rates. We present Error Resilient System Architecture (ERSA), a low-cost robust system architecture for emerging killer probabilistic applications such as Recognition, Mining and Synthesis (RMS) applications. While resilience of such applications to errors in low-order bits of data is well-known, execution of such applications on error-prone hardware significantly degrades output quality (due to high-order bit errors and crashes). ERSA achieves high error resilience to high-order bit errors and control errors (in addition to low-order bit errors) using a judicious combination of 3 key ideas: (1) asymmetric reliability in many-core architectures, (2) error-resilient algorithms at the core of probabilistic applications, and (3) intelligent software optimizations. Error injection experiments on a multi-core ERSA hardware prototype demonstrate that, even at very high error rates of 20,000 errors/second/core or 2x10-4 error/cycle/core (with errors injected in architecturally-visible registers), ERSA maintains 90% or better accuracy of output results, together with minimal impact on execution time, for probabilistic applications such as K-Means clustering, LDPC decoding and Bayesian networks. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of ERSA in tolerating high rates of static memory errors that are characteristic of emerging challenges such as Vccmin problems and erratic bit errors. Using the concept of configurable reliability, ERSA platforms may also be adapted for general-purpose applications that are less resilient to errors (but at higher costs).