System-Physician-on-a-Chip (SPOC): Chip Health-Monitoring Infrastructure IP and Run-Time Adaptation

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Design-time solutions and guard-bands for resilience are no longer sufficient for nanoscale integrated circuits (ICs). Each chip, due to process variations, is born with a unique personality (nature), and because of operating conditions, environment, and workload, grows uniquely (nurture). This project is motivated by the need to guarantee that each system, despite different nature and nurture, has an acceptable behavior (resilience). Resilience has been defined as the persistence of performance level that can justifiably be trusted in the presence of change. Hence static solutions based on pre-determined adaptation strategies cannot provide adequate resilience as systems evolve with time. While todays ICs incorporate a large number of sensors (thermal, voltage, delay, etc.) for runtime monitoring, breakthroughs are needed to extract useful information from sensor data, perform real-time analysis, and make decisions about online adaptation. Appropriate reasoning methods are also needed to deal with inconsistent or contradictory sensor data due to stress-, process-, and workload-induced spatiotemporal variations. It is important to predict system state so that countermeasures can be taken before a failure occurs. The proposed research is focused on data-driven techniques for guiding dynamic adaptation policies. This level of dynamic decision-making and prediction-based control is a significant step forward towards resilient systems. The intellectual merit lies in the advancement of data analytics solutions for reasoning about on-chip behavior, the integration of prediction-based adaptation, and the update of adaptation strategies based on success, or lack thereof, of past adaptation decisions. Specific tasks include: 1. Monitoring of performance, power, and reliability: In addition to the use of on-chip sensors, the research will involve the reuse and redesign of BIST infrastructure to accurately monitor events such as voltage droop and aging by aggregating