SMCV: a Methodology for Detecting Transient Faults in Multicore Clusters

The challenge of improving the performance of current processors is achieved by increasing the integration scale. This carries a growing vulnerability to transient faults, which increase their impact on multicore clusters running large scientific parallel applications. The requirement for enh...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Diego Montezanti, Fernando Emmanuel Frati, Dolores Rexachs, Emilio Luque, Marcelo Naiouf, Armando De Giusti
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Centro Latinoamericano de Estudios en Informática 2012-12-01
Series:CLEI Electronic Journal
Online Access:http://www.clei.org/cleiej-beta/index.php/cleiej/article/view/138
Description
Summary:The challenge of improving the performance of current processors is achieved by increasing the integration scale. This carries a growing vulnerability to transient faults, which increase their impact on multicore clusters running large scientific parallel applications. The requirement for enhancing the reliability of these systems, coupled with the high cost of rerunning the application from the beginning, create the motivation for having specific software strategies for the target systems. This paper introduces SMCV, which is a fully distributed technique that provides fault detection for message-passing parallel applications, by validating the contents of the messages to be sent, preventing the transmission of errors to other processes and leveraging the intrinsic hardware redundancy of the multicore. SMCV achieves a wide robustness against transient faults with a reduced overhead, and accomplishes a trade-off between moderate detection latency and low additional workload.
ISSN:0717-5000