Energy Reduction through Differential Reliability and Lightweight Checking
Edin Kadric,
Kunal Mahajan, and André DeHon
Proceedings of the IEEE
Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines,
(FCCM, May 11--13, 2014)
As technology feature sizes shrink, aggressive voltage scaling is required
to contain power density. However, this also increases the rate of
transient upsets---potentially preventing us from scaling down voltage and
possibly even requiring voltage increases to maintain reliability.
Duplication with checking and triple-modular redundancy are traditional
approaches to combat transient errors, but spending 2--3x the energy for
redundant computation can diminish or reverse the benefits of voltage
scaling. As an alternative, we explore the opportunity to use checking
computations that are cheaper than the base computation they are guarding.
We identify and evaluate the effectiveness of lightweight checks in a broad
set of common FPGA tasks in scientific computing and signal and image
processing. We find that the lightweight checks cost less than 14% of the
base computation. Using an exponential model for the relationship between
voltage and transient upset rate, we are able to show over 80% net energy
reduction by aggressive voltage scaling without compromising reliability
compared to operation at the nominal voltage.
© 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is
permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material
for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new
collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists,
or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works
must be obtained from the IEEE.
This material is presented to ensure timely
dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all
rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright
holders. All persons copying this information are expected to
adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's
copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without
the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
(
IEEE Copyright)
|
