Abstract-Proposed exascale systems will present considerable challenges. In particular, DRAM soft-errors, or bit-flips, are expected to greatly increase due to higher memory densities and near-threshold voltages. To address this challenge, we introduce FlipSphere, a tunable, transparent silent data corruption detection and correction library for HPC applications that is first in its class to use hardware accelerators, such as the Intel Xeon Phi MIC, to increase application resilience. FlipSphere provides comprehensive silent data corruption protection for application memory by implementing on-demand page integrity verification coupled with a software-based error correcting code that allows for automatic error recovery. Using this framework, we demonstrate the trade-offs of dedicating hardware resources for resilience, showing up to 90% of memory may be protected with a 40% slowdown.
Flipsphere REF uses a software-based ECC methods to detect and correct SDC.
FlipSphere: A Software-Based DRAM Error Detection and Correction Library for HPC
2016 IEEE/ACM 20th International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT)
2016 IEEE/ACM 20th International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT)
Computer Science