Using HVF to Enhance AVF Analysis
Speaker: Vilas Sridharan , AMD, Inc.
Date: June 14 2010
Time: 3:30PM to 5:00PM
Location: 32-G449 (Kiva)
Host: Arvind, CSG-CSAIL-MIT
Contact: Sally Lee, 3-6837, sally@csail.mit.edu
Relevant URL: Abstract:
Fault tolerance is now a primary design constraint for all major microprocessors. One step in determining a
proces-sor's compliance to its failure rate target is measuring the Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF) of
each on-chip structure. The AVF of a hardware structure is the probability that a fault in the structure will affect
the output of a program. AVF generates meaningful insight into system behavior, but it cannot quantify the
vulnerability of an individual system component (hardware, user program, etc.). This limits the amount of insight
that can be generated. To address this, prior work has introduced the Program Vulnerability Factor (PVF) to
quantify the vulnerability of soft-ware. In this talk, we introduce the Hardware Vulnerability Factor (HVF) to
quantify the vulnerability of hardware.
We examine three concrete benefits of HVF. First, HVF analysis can provide insight to hardware designers
beyond that gained from AVF analysis alone. Second, separating AVF analysis into HVF and PVF steps
accelerates the AVF measurement process. Finally, HVF measurement enables runtime AVF estimation
that combines compile-time PVF estimates with runtime HVF measurements. A key benefit of this technique
is that it allows software developers to influence the runtime AVF estimates. We demonstrate that this technique
can estimate AVF at runtime with an average absolute error of less than 3%.
Bio:
Vilas Sridharan received his PhD in Computer Architecture from Northeastern University in 2010, and a
B.S.E. from Princeton University in 2000. His research focuses primarily on system reliability and tolerance
to transient faults. From 2000-2004, Vilas worked in the SPARC server division at Sun Microsystems.
He currently works in the RAS (Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability) Architecture and Strategy group
at AMD, Inc., in Boxborough, MA
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