Intermittent Hardware Errors Recovery: Modeling and Evaluation

Abstract

The frequency of hardware errors is increasing due to shrinking feature sizes, higher levels of integration, and increasing design complexity. Intermittent errors are those that occur non-deterministically at the same location. It has been shown that intermittent hardware errors contribute to about 39% of the total hardware failures. Intermittent faults have characteristics that are different than transient and permanent errors, which makes it challenging to devise efficient recovery techniques for them. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of different intermittent error recovery scenarios on the processor performance. To achieve this, we model a system that consists of a fault-tolerant multicore processor subject to intermittent faults. Our fault models are based on insights from related work at the physical level. We find that the frequency of the intermittent error and the relative importance of the error location play an important role in choosing the recovery action that maximizes the processor's performance.