Research Initiation Award: Incorporating Fault Tolerance in the Multiscalar Processor

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9410706 Franklin The multiscalar processor is a recently proposed execution paradigm for exploiting instruction-level parallelism. It is a collection of sequential processors that are connected together in a logically decoupled and physically decentralized manner using ring-type network. The central idea is to divide an instruction stream into blocks of instructions, and then exploit parallelism by executing these blocks using multiple processing elements. The multiscalar processor has generated wide interest, both in the academia and the industry, and seems to have tremendous potential to become the processing paradigm of choice for a circa 2000 intruction level parallel processor. The purpose of this research is to develop a high performance fault tolerant multiscalar processor and to provide an impetus to the incorporation of fault tolerance in general purpose processors. The primary manner fault tolerance will be incorporated in the multiscalar processor is by run-time replication of software and by executing the replicas on the processor's multiple execution units, which are provided for performance reasons. Two re-execution schemes (both using the same replication technique) are under investigation. Preliminary simulation studies have been conducted to get an idea of the performance loss incurred because of fault tolerance. These preliminary results indicate that time-redundant techniques are an excellent choice for providing fault tolerance in the multiscalar processor. ***