CAREER: Architectural Mechanisms for Cooperative Reliability

职业：合作可靠性的架构机制

• 批准号: 0954107
• 负责人: Mattan Erez
• 金额: $ 43万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-03-15 至 2016-02-29
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0954107&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Architectural; Mechanisms; Cooperative; Reliability

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.

这个项目探讨了硬件和软件技术，以及编程模型的考虑，以实现灵活和动态的软错误保护。目前的硬件容错机制采取全有或全无的方法：用户要么预付最坏情况下的错误保护费用，要么完全依赖软件来容忍错误。然而，对于许多应用和使用场景，这两个选项都不是期望的。每种方法都会导致资源浪费和性能下降。 我们的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实现合作保护方案并最大限度地提高效率。PI将研究允许硬件设计师，软件系统和程序员为他们的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容错付费”。将研究和分析适用的场景，以衡量整体系统设计、有效内存容量和性能/功耗的优势。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。该方法基于一种称为“有限保证精度”的新机制，该机制允许程序员选择性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的材料，以实现将可靠性视为一流应用属性的好处。教育计划围绕课程模块，问题和演示，从适合高中和初中的流行和小型会谈，通过低年级和高年级本科课程模块，到深入的研究生水平的学习。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。这项研究的成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。