CAREER: Architectural Mechanisms for Cooperative Reliability

本项目探讨硬件和软件技术以及编程模型考虑因素，以实现灵活和动态的软错误保护。当前的硬件容错机制采取全有或全无的方法：用户要么准备进行最坏情况下的错误保护，要么完全依赖软件来容错。然而，对于许多应用程序和使用场景来说，这两种选择都不是理想的。每种方法都会导致资源浪费和性能浪费。其目标是通过模糊软错误保护的硬件和软件控制之间的界限来启用协作保护方案并最大化效率。PI将研究允许硬件设计人员、软件系统和程序员为其使用模型做出最佳决策的技术。其目的是使容错成为一流的优化选项，以便允许用户“为他们需要的容错付费，而不是为他们可能需要的东西支付过高的费用”。将研究和分析适用的场景，以衡量在总体系统设计、有效内存容量和性能/功率方面的优势。PI还将为程序员开发方法，以明确但抽象和直观地表达保护和硬件资源之间的权衡。该方法基于一种名为“有限保证精度”的新机制，该机制允许程序员有选择地保护计算的昂贵或敏感部分。为了实现长期影响，将开发培训开发人员认识到将可靠性作为一流应用属性的好处的材料。教育计划围绕课程模块、问题和演示展开，从适用于高中和中学的流行和迷你演讲，到下级和高级本科课程模块，再到深入的研究生水平学习。该项目还将向非计算机科学家/工程师的学生介绍科学计算和系统，并对他们进行培训，从而提高美国高端计算的竞争力。这项研究的结果可以通过保持科学和工程计算工具的进步来影响相关领域、行业和整个社会。

This project explores hardware and software techniques, as well as programming model considerations, for enabling flexible and dynamic soft error protection. Current hardware error-tolerance mechanisms take an all-or-nothing approach: the user either prepays for worst-case error protection or relies entirely on software to tolerate errors. Neither option is desirable for many applications and usage scenarios, however. Each approach results in wasted resources and squandered performance. The goal is to enable cooperative protection schemes and maximize efficiency by blurring the lines between the hardware and software control of soft error protection. The PI will investigate techniques that allow the hardware designer, software system, and programmer to make optimal decisions for their usage model. The aim is to make error tolerance a first-class optimization option in order to allow users to "pay for the error tolerance they need, rather than overpay for what they might need". Applicable scenarios will be studied and analyzed to gauge the advantages to overall system design, effective memory capacity, and performance/power. The PI will also develop methods for the programmer to explicitly yet abstractly and intuitively express trade off between protection and hardware resources. The approach is based on a new mechanism called ``limited guaranteed precision", which allows a programmer to selectively protect costly or sensitive portions of a computation. To achieve long-term impact, materials to train developers to realize the benefits of treating reliability as a first-class application property will be developed. The education plan revolves around course modules, problems, and demonstrations at levels ranging from popular and mini-talks suitable for high-school and middle-school, through lower and upper division undergraduate course modules, to in-depth graduate-level study. The project will also introduce students who are not computer scientists/engineers to scientific computing and systems and train them, thereby increasing US high-end computing competitiveness. The outcome of this research can impact related fields, industry, and society at large by maintaining advances in computational tools for science and engineering.