Performance constraint-aware task mapping to optimize lifetime reliability of manycore systems

Abstract

Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) has emerged as a critical challenge to lifetime reliability of computing systems. Traditionally, temperature-aware methodologies are used to mitigate the impact of NBTI on aging and degradation of computing systems. However, in the presence of process variation, which is the norm in manycore processors, temperature-aware techniques are inefficient in improving lifetime reliability and can result in poor performance. In this paper, we propose a novel performance constraint-aware task mapping technique to improve lifetime reliability by mitigating NBTI considering on-chip process variation. Our approach consists of two phases, namely design-time and run-time. During design time, we generate Pareto-optimal mappings. Following which, our run-time technique judiciously intervenes to perform workload migration to save the weakest processing core. We compare our approach with performance-greedy and thermal-aware task mapping techniques. The experiment results demonstrate that our approach outperforms other two techniques and improves lifetime reliability of a manycore system as much as 54% without violating the throughput constraint.