Resilient chip multiprocessors with mixed-grained reconfigurability

Abstract

This article presents a chip multiprocessor (CMP) design that mixes coarse- and fine-grained reconfigurability to increase core availability of safety-critical embedded systems in the presence of hard errors. The authors conducted a comprehensive design-space exploration to identify the granularity mixes that maximize CMP fault tolerance and minimize performance and energy overheads. The authors added fine-grained reconfigurable logic to a coarse-grained sparing approach. Their resulting design can tolerate 3 times more hard errors than core redundancy and 1.5 times more than any other purely coarse-grained solution.