On-demand fault-tolerant loop processing on massively parallel processor arrays

Abstract

We present a compilation-based technique for providing on-demand structural redundancy for massively parallel processor arrays. Thereby, application programmers gain the capability to trade throughput for reliability according to application requirements. To protect parallel loop computations against errors, we propose to apply the well-known fault tolerance schemes dual modular redundancy (DMR) and triple modular redundancy (TMR) to a whole region of the processor array rather than individual processing elements. At the source code level, the compiler realizes these replication schemes with a program transformation that: (1) replicates a parallel loop program two or three times for DMR or TMR, respectively, and (2) introduces appropriate voting operations whose frequency and location may be chosen from three proposed variants. Which variant to choose depends, for example, on the error resilience needs of the application or the expected soft error rates. Finally, we explore the different tradeoffs of these variants in terms of performance overheads and error detection latency.